UPDATED MARCH 11, 2025 | The Neighborhood Congregational Church in Laguna Beach, California, has been rethinking its place in the community for years. It’s had a long, 80-year history in the city, but like many other churches across the U.S., attendance has been dwindling. Today, you can find about 30 worshippers there on a given Sunday. The congregation was built for more than 200.
Instead of closing its doors and selling its land to the highest bidder, the church is finding another way to serve the community. In 2020, parish leaders unanimously voted to redesign the church’s grounds to include, among other things, an affordable housing complex, the first such affordable housing project in the city in almost two decades.
While the church’s plan for the next iteration of its spiritual life began years ago, its project can now take advantage of an expedited development process thanks to California’s “Yes in God’s Backyard” (YIGBY) law, also known as SB 4. The state law, which went into effect last year, gives nonprofit colleges and religious institutions like the Neighborhood Congregational Church the power to build 100-percent affordable housing projects on their properties “by right,” bypassing any special zoning requirements from the city so long as the project meets state-mandated criteria.
The YIGBY movement—an offshoot of the “Yes in My Backyard,” or YIMBY, movement—originated in San Diego as local housing advocates looked to address homelessness there. Its premise is to allow religious institutions—historically large landowners in the U.S.—to participate in solving the housing crisis by repurposing underutilized religious land to accommodate affordable housing. To that end, the movement pushes for legal reforms to remove restrictive zoning laws that prohibit religious property from being used for anything else.
As the housing crisis deepens, interest in the movement has since spread across the country. These types of laws have been proposed in states like New York, Virginia, and Hawaii; and adopted in cities like Atlanta, Georgia, and San Antonio, Texas, among other jurisdictions.
Not only do these laws allow religious institutions to fast-track existing projects, but it also invites congregations that have never considered utilizing their land beyond worship into the conversation of what service to their community can look like. Housing advocates say that it’s a matter of political will and moral imperative to see houses of worship assuming such a role, and both are needed to realize the YIGBY dream.
SB 4—Responding to the Housing Crisis
With the highest cost of living in the country, it’s no wonder that California has more rent-burdened residents than any other state (meaning that they spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing)—and, consequently, the largest share of the nation’s unhoused population.
SB 4 was one of 56 bills signed into law in 2023 to help streamline new construction, expand tenant protections, and “keep housing affordable.”
“Affordable housing is not being built at the rate needed in California because of the complex, lengthy, and costly entitlement process,” said Rodrick Echols, the pastor at Neighborhood Congregational Church. “SB 4 presents an unexpected opportunity.”
The groundbreaking law bypasses restrictive zoning laws and other onerous restrictions that have notoriously hampered affordable housing development.
While advocates say it’s too soon to forecast how many projects will now be developed because of SB 4, perhaps the most immediate outcome of the law’s passage is how houses of worship have responded to this newfound opportunity. Some 80 congregations across faiths have begun looking into developing housing, John Oh, project manager of the Faith in Housing initiative at L.A. Voice, told The New York Times—and that’s just in Los Angeles. An analysis by the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at U.C. Berkeley, California, estimates that as many as 171,000 acres of potentially developable land owned by nonprofit colleges and religious institutions could be unlocked through this law.
Several YIGBY laws already have been implemented by local governments across the country, but California’s is only the second state-level law, following Washington’s HB 1377, which extends a density bonus for 100-percent affordable housing built on property owned by religious institutions—increasing the number of units they’re allowed to build—albeit with local jurisdictions still determining the scope of that bonus so that it’s “consistent with local needs.”
California’s SB 4 goes a step further by bypassing local permitting processes that seek special approval from the city for affordable housing—which means that city officials can’t reject a housing project that puts affordable apartments among single-family homes.
If the project meets the requirement set in SB 4, then the city can no longer deny it; they have to approve it.”
Mahdi Manji, Inner City Law Center
“Many cities prefer to have the power to deny a project, if they so desire,” says Mahdi Manji, director of policy at the Inner City Law Center, a nonprofit law firm based in Skid Row that serves homeless people and those at risk of homeless in LA County. The firm was also a co-sponsor of SB 4. “Now, if the project meets the requirement set in SB 4, then the city can no longer deny it; they have to approve it.”
What’s more, these institutions are only allowed to contract with “qualified developers”—which, Manji says, is defined in SB 4 to mean affordable housing developers and local public entities.
“It creates this win-win situation, because only they can utilize this process,” he says.
SB 4 emphasizes affordability in explicit ways, requiring—rather than incentivizing—that 100 percent of the units built be affordable housing with below market-rate rents, and that properties maintain the state affordability standards for 55 years for rentals, and 45 years for owned homes.
Previous iterations of the law failed twice in the legislature. But SB 4 passed overwhelmingly, with only 3 of 120 legislators opposing it.
Other states, like New York, Virginia, and Hawaii, hope to emulate California’s model with their own YIGBY laws. There’s also a federal bill introduced to Congress in 2024 that would support these projects nationwide with technical assistance and new grant funding.
More than anything, housing advocates say that these bills will give faith-based organizations permission to consider how their service to their communities can evolve—and not just from the government but also from themselves.
Following California
Currently making its way through New York’s state legislature is the Faith-Based Affordable Housing Act (S3397/A3647), which would allow residential buildings for affordable housing on religious land in urban areas. If passed, cities must approve permits for these projects within 60 days, without charging extra fees, and developers must complete real estate training before selling or leasing the land.
Like California, New York state has an acute housing crisis, where the demand for housing far outpaces available supply, driving up prices to the point where more than half of residents are rent-burdened. The state competes with California and Hawaii for the highest rate of homelessness in the country.
In New York, zoning policies that make new housing construction more difficult and more expensive—driving up home prices in the process—are especially restrictive not just in New York City but across the state’s jurisdictions.
“It’s not just a zoning code on a piece of paper,” says Melissa Bondi, Mid-Atlantic senior director for Enterprise Community Partners, a national housing nonprofit that houses the Faith-Based Development Initiative. The initiative provides training, technical assistance, and funding to houses of worship that are looking to develop affordable homes and community facilities on their properties. “This is something where you could say, ‘Here’s this parcel of land, and already the people who steward [it] are working hard to serve the community in ways that are tangible and appreciated. They just want to be able to do more.’”
For that reason, Bondi says, she sees faith-based land use initiatives enjoying more political goodwill than others. “It puts more of a public face on a land use question—which, from an official’s perspective, is often a positive [when] trying to introduce ideas of, ‘How do we increase housing supply?’”
Faith leaders who recently rallied at the state capitol for Housing Advocacy Day said that the legislation would produce 60,000 homes in New York over the next decade.
The Faith-Based Affordable Housing Act, first conceived by the New York State Council of Churches in collaboration with the New York State Affordable Housing Association, among others, was originally intended to adhere more closely to California’s SB 4—particularly with the affordability requirement—but the bill does allow up to 100-percent committed affordability per project.
“This is the balance in any piece of legislation,” says Rashida Tyler, the council’s deputy executive director. “Do you want a bill that is broadly available and will get more developers involved, thereby have more housing being built? Or, do you want to have a bill that’s very specific and has less developers involved, but creates more of the deeper affordable housing units?”
Besides, says the Rev. Peter Cook, the council’s executive director, “Zoning will only take you so far. That should not be stopping us from pushing on all fronts to raise the amount of subsidy available so that it’s possible to build higher percentages of affordable housing than the minimums that are required.”
[RELATED ARTICLE: Black Congregations Are Developing Housing on Church Land]
But while housing advocates are pushing for better fine print, opponents of the bill decry its “hidden consequences” for New York’s cultural heritage.
“At what point does the pursuit of fiscal solvency begin to erode the very soul of communal and cultural land?” wrote state assembly member Daniel O’Donnell in an op-ed for City Limits. “The push towards developing these sites into apartment buildings, as encouraged by the Faith-Based Affordable Housing Act, poses a threat to preserving this heritage. A threat that can irreversibly eliminate parts of sites that are centuries old and carry profound importance for communities.”
Cook calls O’Donnell’s position misleading, saying it only serves to dissuade legislators from working hard for the bill’s passage and “wish the legislation would go away or get buried in committee.”
“This comment reflects a real misunderstanding about the churches’ commitment to preservation and meeting the needs of people in their community,” says Cook. “Without the option to build housing, you lessen a faith community’s ability to raise the needed funds for preservation while forcing them to neglect crucial housing needs in the community.”
But the argument nonetheless provokes another pain point for YIGBY advocates: community opposition.
‘Yes in God’s Backyard’
The Neighborhood Congregational Church recently filed an application with the city to build 44 affordable housing units on its land, less than it had originally anticipated. When the congregation submitted a conceptual design to court grant funding for the project, it immediately caught the attention—and ire—of some of its neighbors, who wasted no time in opposing it.
A still-active online petition to fight the project has more than 2,000 signatures from people who cite the project’s size, community safety, and negative impacts on the community’s character, as well as on the congregation itself, as reasons for their opposition. Opponents commented on the project’s location impacting tourism revenue (the property is a few blocks away from world-renowned beaches), property values, traffic, and parking, with some saying that the future “homeless shelter” (misrepresenting the project) is in too close proximity to liquor vendors, presenting a safety risk for local high school students.
Under SB 4, the church is not required to consider community input, but as a fixture of a town of 22,000 for decades, it still plans to bring the neighborhood along with it on its transformation, says Echols. “We are doing our best to incorporate their feedback while keeping our eyes on the goals of this development.”
In Hawaii, community buy-in is just as difficult. “We don’t like change in Hawaii,” says the Rev. Josh Hayashi, CEO and co-founder of Mission Management Company, an organization that assists faith institutions with repurposing their assets. Hayashi hopes that a YIGBY bill (HCR122/HR102) currently under consideration in the legislature will help change that, because the need for affordable housing in the state is dire.
The median cost of a home in Hawaii is 2.7 times higher than the national median (3.4 times higher on the island of Oahu), according to a 2023 emergency proclamation on housing. The state also has the highest median rents in the nation, leaving more than half of residents rent-burdened and driving out Native Hawaiians from their homeland.
I’d rather keep our young people here than preserve the character of the neighborhood.”
Josh Hayashi, Mission Management Company
Hawaii also has the most restrictive land use regulations in the country, with permitting typically taking three times as long as the average mainland jurisdiction—due in part to the islands’ finite land and natural resources—hampering new home construction.
The Mission Management Company has been running a two-pronged campaign to both champion the state to follow California’s lead with faith-based zoning reforms as well as court community members to support it. Hayashi says that around 3,000 acres of land across the island chain are owned by faith-based entities, and if those properties—across denominations—were combined, then they would be among the state’s top 10 largest landholders.
But many of Hawaii’s faith-based properties are historic, with legacies going back to the Hawaiian Kingdom. “Different, strong feelings are associated with that,” Hayashi says. “It’s ‘Not in My Backyard’ compounded by historical factors.”
There is also opposition from a different subset of neighbors, says Hayashi: out-of-state owners, who represent a significant portion of property owners in Hawaii, and recent transplants from the mainland. “That’s the thing, so many of the people in opposition now are not part of those social circles in Hawaii specifically, so they’re not as engaged in the communities.”
As for locals who fear that their communities are being eroded as their neighbors are “priced out of paradise” and out-of-state and foreign property ownership swells (in 2023, out-of-state buyers represented more than 20 percent of single-family home and condo sales in the state), churches often represent one of the few landmarks that they still recognize.
“I was talking to one neighbor, and she was saying that affordable housing is not in character with what the neighborhood requires. I’d rather keep our young people here than preserve the character of the neighborhood.” says Hayashi. “The moral argument is a different type of conversation that the church can have.”
Meeting the Moment
But the main challenge for a YIGBY movement in the state, he said, is actually with the churches themselves: “They feel like they occupy more of a cultural position in the community, rather than an active participation or involvement within the community.”
Hayashi says the Mission Management Company and other YIGBY proponents are trying to help churches consider faith-based development as a way to reengage with their communities—even as a form of reparations for historical wrongs, as the institution of the church in Hawaii also has a fraught legacy tied to colonization of the island chain.
“There is appetite for that from the churches,” says Hayashi, “but it takes a little bit of time to get through that.”
Still, awareness is building among religious institutions across the state as they face down the same existential crisis as their counterparts in the continental United States, with congregations diminishing in part because members simply cannot afford to stay in their communities.
And whether they have the backing of their city, state, or the federal government to build affordable housing on their properties, religious institutions are still rising to the question of what the next iteration of their spiritual lives—and service to their communities—can and should look like today.
“It’s not forcing anybody to do anything,” says Manji of the Inner City Law Center in Los Angeles. “But it is creating an option.”
“They’re experiencing the grief, but a lot of them are starting to realize that they need to change,” says Hayashi. “This is an opportunity [for the church] to rethink itself.”
Editor’s Note: This article has been updated as The Neighborhood Congregational Church in Laguna Beach, California, officially filed an application on March 8, 2025 to build 44 affordable housing units on its land. When this story first published, the congregation had not filed its application with the city.
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This is a great effort. States should next ban the highly restrictive religious covenants that the Catholic church puts on their land in perpetuity. This keeps abandoned Catholic churches from being redeveloped – or even torn down – if the future use of the land violates any of their “morality covenants.” This keeps churches empty for decades, hampering redevelopment and furthering blight.