Saving Church from State: how YIGBY can help faith communities do their best work

Introduction

Notre Dame Cathedral recently reopened to the public, following five years of reconstruction after a fire ravaged the structure. The building is a landmark of artistry and architecture, its construction taking nearly two centuries, but the name belies a subtle purpose: Our Lady of Paris was intended as a church of the people. It’s served as a space for Parisians to meet and learn, to practice their faith, and to come together in purpose. Over the centuries it has been a hospital, a school, and housing when needed. Modern architecture is austere and often artless, but the cathedral’s statuary and stained glass spoke to a mostly illiterate populace in a language they could understand; the size and details all communicate the depth and stories of its builder’s faith. In the modern world, it could never be built at all.

Ostensibly, America was founded on the principle that individuals should be free to choose how to practice their faith, to form their own communities, and express their beliefs. Zoning laws and the slow encroachment of local governments over every aspect of community-building, have eroded those freedoms. You and any community you would build with common purpose have no say in the use of your own resources. Those decisions are made by politicians, forwarding their own interests and beliefs. City bureaucrats operating without oversight get to dictate the structure and use of land, standing in the way of religious and educational institutions that want to fulfill their mandates and better the lot of their people.

Mission-based housing policies, going by many names but often YIGBY (Yes In God’s Back Yard) are moving forward nationwide to redress this overreach. Where petty political interests stand in the way of communities solving their own problems, these policies would return communities the ability to decide the course of their own lives. The freedom to use their own resources, their own people, their own land, to use as they see fit. Groups of like-minded people can be more effective than any government when given the chance. It’s time that the government stopped standing in their way.

How Modern Zoning hurts religious communities

Words like Church, Temple, or University carry a lot of meanings that obscure more direct meaning: while they are institutional structures and legal organizations, they are also, first and foremost, buildings. Walls, roofs, and seats with the space for people to gather and learn. Places where you can hold events, find purpose, and come to consensus. American governance is making those buildings harder to construct and harder to access, forcing us away from one another.

America is fracturing from a lack of community. Government institutions worldwide are tackling an epidemic of loneliness and the internet is falling to extremist accelerationism because we, as a people, lack the simple human connection that used to be a basic, regular part of our lives. Problems that we used to be able to see and address locally are getting worse because zoning laws keep us spread apart.

Communities on Main Street America keep finding themselves with the same problem: well-intentioned, organized groups are looking at the need in their towns and trying to serve them, only to find a government official telling them they can’t. The need keeps getting worse, and the people best positioned to respond to it aren’t allowed to. Discretionary approvals mean that planning commissioners and city councilors can and will say no to more density and affordable housing. They insinuate that affordable housing will bring crime and blight to communities while they add conditions that make projects more expensive, more time-consuming, and more difficult for community leaders to navigate. While they drain mental and financial resources, they perpetuate the problems of homelessness and disconnection for no real purpose.

Everything built needs to be small. Everything needs to have parking. What is the result? People who are separated from one another. Educational and faith institutions are only accessible by car. Anyone without access to a car because of age, physical disability, or finances has no way to reach the people who might want to help them. The people who, by mandate of their religion, would be most motivated to offer them food or shelter or simple human contact. We’re being scattered when we should be brought together. We see the American populace desperate to meet and find common ground, but zoning forces us away from one another, locked away from one another in the manicured lawns and gilded cages of suburbia.

Specific Examples

In Pottstown Pennsylvania, Churches were trying to open their doors as homeless shelters but the government disallowed them. They were told it wasn’t legal to offer shelter, instead having to pass people around between churches on a temporary basis or face government harassment. A core tenet of the religion, a function its people were fighting to serve, curtailed by government minutiae. Thus all parties spent time, money, and energy arguing about bureaucracy instead of solving the real problem of housing. Just last month, a pastor in Ohio was charged criminally for allowing unhoused individuals to sleep in the church overnight.

In Warrenton Virginia, a Methodist church was working to build affordable housing for senior veterans. Its staff devoted considerable resources to serve an unquestionable public good, but had to battle accusations from a town counselor that the project would bring criminals and drug addicts to the town, and that it would house too many people. They were told it would be better to do a smaller, less affordable project, which would fit in better with the local character. Is this just? Is this solving any problems? Churches in Virginia have more land than anyone else combined, and they want to put that land to good use.

I’ve seen personally the value of well-intentioned, organized groups, and how local governments step in to keep them from solving problems. My father mobilized churches to make and distribute food to a growing population of people without enough to eat, a group that kept itself mobile after advice from a partner organization which received years of pushback from the Philadelphia government while trying to do similar work. My father got an injury doing that work that he won’t ever completely recover from.

My mother worked for years to build housing for women over 55 years of age who had been on the streets for over a year. Philadelphia could have told her no initially, could have solved the problem on its own merits, but instead spent years saying it would support the project before ultimately killing the efforts. This was after months of toil navigating city departments, learning about regulations and graft that would add time and expense to every last step of the process. My mother wanted to make a difference for the people in her community, and spent years mired in pointless minutiae created by officials who have still not solved their own problem. No more.

YIGBY can solve these problems

YIMBYs are fighting alongside these communities, individually and systemically. We’re organizing for projects and legislation around the country, offering our voices, our support, and our expertise to move them forward and improve where necessary. I don’t know if our letter to Warrenton’s town council moved the needle, but I was proud to write it nonetheless.

“Yes in God’s Backyard” (YIGBY) bills have passed in Minnesota, Oregon, and California. Colorado and New York are working on following suit. These laws differ in some details, but share a few common themes: all cut down on local discretion, allow ways to get around local zoning rules, and create exceptions around height and density requirements. These laws allow faith-based organizations to build affordable housing on their land without needing rezoning or facing restrictive local regulations. They streamline the approval process, often overriding local zoning laws, to encourage low-income and supportive housing development. Additionally, these laws often include provisions for reduced parking requirements, expedited permitting, and financial incentives to further support the development of affordable and transitional housing on faith-owned properties. Generally these homes would not be tax-exempt; neighborhoods would get financial boons and improvements to their communities and all they have to do is stop getting in the way of progress.

Freedom of expression can’t exist where local government can tell you where you can associate and how you are allowed to serve your community. The government is meant to serve the interests and needs of constituents, but zoning laws have granted officials the ability to say no to every solution. To say no to every gathering, every use of your own property, every choice you would make to serve your neighbors, your conscience, and your faith.

If you want to be involved, YIMBY Action can help. We organize volunteers to speak in favor of housing proposals. We educate activists on how to talk with their representatives, and representatives on how to build and enforce better laws. We have no place in your choice of expression, except that we have faith in you to decide the course of your own life. We believe that you are entitled to that respect and that personal determination. YIGBY laws will help make sure the government doesn’t stand in the way of those crucial, foundational American principles.