Six Cleveland churches are getting seed money to explore turning their properties into affordable housing. Enterprise Community Partners, a national nonprofit focused on housing and community development, selected the congregations, which will each receive a $50,000 pre-development grant to help them create plans for mixed-income and other affordable housing.

Local Churches Leading the Way

The churches will be able to use the grant for such things as a zoning assessment to determine what legally can be built on their land or for a market analysis, which helps in determining if there is demand for the project a church wants to do. Each church gets to work with a real estate development consultant and a clergy coach whose church has already developed a project.

The six churches could develop up to 100 units of affordable housing, according to Enterprise. In their applications for the $50,000 grant, the congregations’ proposals for the land included senior and mixed-income rental housing, reentry housing, workforce housing and for-sale homes.

A Commitment to Affordable Housing

Black churches have had a history in many cities of initiating housing and retail development when other developers weren’t interested in their neighborhoods. In Cleveland, especially on the East Side in the 1970s and 1980s, when housing demolition was the norm, Black churches were often the only entities building housing. It was often affordable senior citizen housing.

The local office knew there was a need among Cleveland-area churches and other houses of worship to develop their land, but they wondered how many would commit to six months of training. Each house of worship had to send a senior clergy member and a layperson. During the development training, participants got an introduction to such topics as how to choose a project, which includes effectively assessing its viability.

Original reporting: Signal Cleveland — read the source article.