Theresa Cho, a pastor at San Francisco’s St. John’s Presbyterian Church on Lake Street, says congregations in SF want to build affordable housing on their properties, but they’re keeping their ambitions private for now. A new state Senate bill, sponsored by SF’s Scott Wiener, might let them take that leap of faith.
A UC Berkeley study has identified over 160 religious bodies in the city that have space to build potentially hundreds of units, but the study doesn’t share details, including addresses, for any of them.
Introducing the bill, known as SB 4, Wiener’s office also noted that dozens of SF congregations across the religious spectrum are interested in developing housing. The Frisc tried to contact several but, other than Cho at St. John’s, got either no response or polite “no comment,” even when offered anonymity.
Why all the secrecy? The people who operate, support, and attend these places of prayer and community know what the housing issue is like around here, and nobody’s about to wander into the lion’s den prematurely.
“We’ve watched what’s happened to other projects,” Cho tells The Frisc. “We’re very clear what could happen with some of ours.”
Cho is part of a Presbyterian clergy work group founded in 2018 to promote housing development. Communities that want to address the housing crisis, she says, have faced a punishing years-long process or high odds of failure, referring to “Goliath-[sized] myths” about affordable housing as a despoiler of residential neighborhoods.
Scripture provides a blueprint for taking down Goliath, but SF’s houses of worship need more than faith and a trusty slingshot to expand their own earthly kingdoms. Which is why Sacramento is offering help from on high.
Third time’s the charm?
The new lawmaking session has begun in Sacramento, and once again state legislators are pushing a pro-housing agenda. Wiener has introduced SB 4, which would let religious groups and nonprofit colleges and universities develop housing “by right” in California — a legal designation that makes it much harder to challenge and derail housing projects.
Most importantly, SB 4 would exempt these developments from CEQA, the California environmental law that can swallow up housing units like a sinkhole before they’re even approved. (Berkeley residents have used CEQA to block new University of California dorms, equating the presence of extra students with pollution.)
Wiener’s bill would also automatically allow development on church lands that are not presently zoned for housing.
If this all sounds familiar, it should: This is the SF state senator’s third attempt at passing more or less this same legislation, the first in 2020 and the second in 2022. The 2020 bill received unanimous approval from a series of Senate committees, but ended up dead because, in part, major construction unions weren’t onboard with it. However, several prominent unions have endorsed this newest variation.
We’ve had folks say, ‘I don’t understand why we can’t just do this,’ and I tell them, ‘I don’t have time to tell you all the reasons we can’t.’
theresa Cho, pastor at St. John’s Presbyterian Church
SB 4 specifies that new housing must be 75 percent priced for low-income households, with another 20 percent for moderate-income residents. (See here for more on how Area Median Income brackets apply to affordable housing.) The last 5 percent may be reserved for church and higher-ed staff.
Would simple neighborhood churches want to wade into the nasty and polarizing politics of housing? Michael Pappas, director of the San Francisco Interfaith Council, says that there are fairly obvious charitable and civic-minded motivations behind many of these explorations.
“Back in 2014, when housing prices were going through the roof, we convened 30 or 35 of the most prominent clergy in SF,” Pappas recalls. “We’re sitting on some of the most valuable and underutilized real estate in the city.” He tells The Frisc that many churches and temples sit on large parcels or have enormous parking lots that may have seemed appropriate 50 or 60 or 100 years ago, but now seem wasteful.
But congregations that pursue development on their sites may find that they’re not zoned for housing at all, or for only a small number of units. Some discover that their building has been a landmark (even if nobody knew it), while others end up entangled in red tape.
Not in God’s backyard
Despite the potential for divine wrath, or perhaps just worldly scorn, SF NIMBYs have taken on neighborhood churches in the recent past: Forest Hill Christian Church announced in 2016 that it planned 150 low-income units on its property along Laguna Honda Boulevard, only to be stymied by opposition from the Forest Hill Association, among others. A church employee who did not wish to be named tells The Frisc the church is not considering a revival of the development, even if SB 4 passes. (Clergy and other representatives did not return requests for an interview.)
In 2020, UC Berkeley’s Terner Center policy director David Garcia identified some 38,800 acres of holy land across 42 California counties that might be repurposed for housing, an area roughly equivalent to the city of Hayward and larger than Santa Rosa.
Of those, 98 acres are located in SF, spread around 162 sites. The study is a few years old, and critically does not include the lands of nonprofit colleges, which are a new addition to SB 4. A Terner Center spokesperson says it plans to update the study in a few months.
SF has roughly 500 buildings used primarily for religious services, so 162 parcels could yield thousands of new homes. (Some architects estimate that an acre can hold up to 115 homes, although this wouldn’t be feasible for many SF sites because of height limits.) As a point of reference, 98 acres is more than double the area of Stonestown, the SF mall about to get a big makeover with more than 2,900 new homes.
In addition, these sites are in locations that the city’s new housing plan prioritizes for development. For example, 87 acres are flagged as “near transit,” and Garcia singles out 85 acres as lying in “high resource” or at least “moderate resource” neighborhoods, versus just five in “high segregation and poverty areas.”
“The land that this opens up is in high-need areas that need to build more housing,” Wiener spokesperson Erik Mebust tells The Frisc, noting that places of worship are conveniently spread pretty much everywhere, and since religious bodies already own the land, affordable developers won’t have to compete with market-rate builders for the chance to build. Despite the aforementioned Forest Hill treatment, in cases where “it’s hard to get people to trust a for-profit developer or even a nonprofit developer,” it could be “they’ll trust their neighborhood pastor” instead, Mebust adds.
Backers of SB 4 think this version has more than a prayer of passing this time. “Affordable housing is complicated, and part of the reason this bill [has support from religious organizations] is they have heard of frustrated experiences with cities saying no,” says Abram Diaz, policy director of the Non-Profit Housing Association of Northern California, a bill co-sponsor.
Fraying faith
There’s another reason religious groups might want to build housing. Gallup estimated in 2021 that regular worship attendance in America dropped below 50 percent for the first time, a trend that goes back two decades, and San Francisco has one of the highest U.S. proportions of residents who identify as irreligious.
With many places of worship falling on hard times, some “have no alternative,” says Ryan Querubin, associate director of development at Christian Church Homes. “Maybe they’re going out of business because of fewer folks attending, maybe the parent body decided to look at closing down that location and the best use of that land is housing.”
While housing may seem like a solution to multiple problems, some groups don’t know what they would be getting into — including the prospect of a multiyear commitment. “We’ve had folks say, ‘I don’t understand why we can’t just do this,’ and I tell them, ‘I don’t have time to tell you all the reasons we can’t,” says Cho, the St. John’s pastor.
Cho remains wary of bureaucracy and politics. “Sometimes one [city] department doesn’t know that the other department has made a decision that’s made their demand impossible,” Cho says. “Sometimes you’ve got a supervisor who’s extremely helpful, but then an election happens and you get a new supervisor with different priorities.”
While SB 4 can’t reform city politics, it could help housing projects circumvent much of it, and chip away at the state environmental law abused by cynical interests. Best-case scenario, it might help a few hundred people, maybe a lot more, find housing in a crisis. And in this city, to paraphrase Bob Dylan, that would be like getting to heaven before they close the door.