MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
People across the country are struggling to find housing they can afford. Half of renters in the U.S. spend roughly a third or more of their income on housing. Now some institutions are stepping up to help. Churches across the country are building low-cost housing on their property. Audrey McGlinchy with member station KUT has one story in Austin, Texas.
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DARYL HORTON: Good morning, Mt. Zion. Put those hands together.
AUDREY MCGLINCHY, BYLINE: It's a Sunday morning in early March. More than a hundred people have gathered at Mt. Zion Baptist Church on Austin's east side. Pastor Daryl Horton steps to the pulpit. He has some announcements. The church is expanding its campus, but the building process is full of municipal red tape.
HORTON: Y'all keep praying for the city as those permits keep going through. We keep sending the permit, and they keep sending it back with little things that they want us to do.
MCGLINCHY: Horton says building is part of the church's mission.
HORTON: But we're going to get it straight. And we're going to get it taken care of so we can continue to build what God has called us to build.
MCGLINCHY: Mt. Zion owns land a couple blocks over from the church. Recently, religious leaders decided to work with a developer to build about 80 apartments, homes they plan to rent to seniors at low cost. Horton estimates that half his congregation commutes in for Sunday service from nearby suburbs where many have moved in search of cheaper housing. Away from the pulpit and in his office, the pastor quotes Jesus.
HORTON: He says that, when I was homeless, you gave me a place to stay. And so I think that that's part of just the dynamic and the heartbeat of what it means to be a person of faith, is to look out for those who are less fortunate and figure out how to help them to make ends meet.
MCGLINCHY: Churches have long helped people struggling to afford housing. But building housing, this is something relatively new. The trend has a name, YIGBY - yes, in God's backyard. It's a play on YIMBY - yes, in my backyard, which is a response to NIMBY - not in my backyard. In California, where housing costs are some of the highest in the country, lawmakers passed a bill in 2023 to make it easier to build homes on church land. Lawmakers in Texas are considering two similar bills.
UNIDENTIFIED CONGREGATION: (Singing) Glory to God in the highest.
MCGLINCHY: Another Sunday morning, this time at St. Austin's Catholic Parish. It's been around for more than a century, and that means its buildings near the University of Texas campus are old.
CHRISTOPHER KENNEDY: The bricks were falling off the face of our church. There was a design...
MCGLINCHY: Like onto the sidewalk?
KENNEDY: Yeah, onto the sidewalk.
MCGLINCHY: Christopher Kennedy has been going to St. Austin's for 30 years. Nearly a decade ago, church leaders started asking how were they going to pay for all the repairs the church needed, especially with fewer people at Mass filling collection baskets? What if the church leased some of its land to a developer? The church got nearly a dozen proposals ranging from a movie theater...
KENNEDY: To a mini grocery store, drugstore, whole bunch of different concepts.
MCGLINCHY: Church leaders eventually picked housing. They finalized a 99-year deal with a developer. The church got a lump sum up front - $5 million. Kennedy estimates the rest of the payments will cover a good chunk of church expenses into the next century, regardless of how packed pews are on a Sunday.
KENNEDY: Because of virtual church post-COVID, the consistency of every week Sunday, those don't occur anymore. Those days are gone.
MCGLINCHY: A 29-story apartment building opened last fall. About a fifth of the units are rented at low cost, mostly to university students. This includes Miranda Farias. She's a senior at the University of Texas.
MIRANDA FARIAS: Like, one of the nicest apartments I've lived in since I've been, like, at school here.
MCGLINCHY: Farias says she pays $1,200 a month to split a two-bedroom apartment. That may not seem cheap, but in this part of Austin, it's a few hundred dollars a month less than apartments nearby. Farias didn't know she was living on land owned by a church, though she'd noticed the church building was so close that from her vantage point, her apartment building seemed to be sitting on top of it.
FARIAS: Thought it was, like, cool that it was on top of a church. Like, I know that it was, like, connected.
MCGLINCHY: Farias says she was raised Catholic.
FARIAS: I don't go to church anymore, but I feel like if I did want to, like, it's literally right downstairs.
MCGLINCHY: Some church leaders said this was an added bonus of building affordable housing. Residents living in apartments on church land might one day end up in the pews.
For NPR News, I'm Audrey McGlinchy in Austin.
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