In Arlington, Virginia, a pastor looked around their church community and saw seniors living in their cars. People who were five minutes from the United States Capitol. In America’s richest county. Living in their cars.
The church owned land that it wasn’t using. The answer was obvious: build some housing.
So Clarendon Presbyterian Church started the process — rezoning, variances, public comment periods, lawyers, consultants, hearings — and five years later had spent over half a million dollars without housing a single person.
They’re not alone. Across Virginia, at least 30 faith communities have tried to build housing on land they already own. Fewer than half have succeeded.
A Deed Is Not a Permission Slip
The Church owns the land. They paid for it — with the congregation’s offerings. And the government treats their deed of ownership like a polite suggestion. Government will let you worship on Sunday. It will not let you act on the words of Jesus Monday through Saturday.
That is not property rights. And it is not religious freedom. Faith that can only be believed inside four walls is not faith. It’s a label.
Jesus didn’t say “love your neighbor” in theory. He said, “I was a stranger, and you invited me in.” That command used to mean real doors on real land. Today, too often, it runs straight into a planning-board obstruction.
What the Church Used to Do — and What Replaced It
The church used to do this work. Before housing authorities, there were parishes. Before Section 8, there were congregations. The church housed the widow. It sheltered the immigrant family. It gave the young couple somewhere to get their start.
It worked, imperfectly yes, but this is humanity we are talking about, because the immediate accountability was real. It was a lot harder to defraud a congregation that knew your face. You couldn’t ignore the widow your deacon visited every week. When something went wrong, the people sitting in the same pew felt it — and they responded. That kind of accountability cannot be written into a regulation. It requires proximity. It requires relationship.
What replaced it? People who process applications. And when the only information you have is what someone wrote on a government form, and when there’s no penalty for being wrong and no reward for being right, you get what you’d expect. Minnesota launched a housing stabilization program estimated to cost $2.6 million a year. By 2024, it was costing $104 million annually — the U.S. Attorney called it a “systematic and wholesale attack“ on state programs. That’s before you get to Feeding Our Future, where a nonprofit claimed to be feeding children and instead stole $250 million in federal funds — mansions, Mercedes, cash withdrawals, and wire transfers overseas. More than 60 people have been convicted. Conservatives already know this pattern. They’ve watched it happen in Medicaid, in food stamps, in childcare learing centers. The through line is always the same: the people approving the checks never knew the people cashing them.
Housing works the same way. The bureaucracy that decides who gets to build, and where, and how, operates on identical logic. No proximity. No accountability. No skin in the game. The planning board member who kills a church’s housing project will never meet the senior who keeps sleeping in her car because of it. That insulation isn’t a flaw in the system. It’s a feature of its design. Detachment for scientific objectivity is the goal.
Subsidiarity
There is an alternative, however, and despite the problem being a worsening crisis with origins that goes back decades. The solution is even older and rooted in the origins of our society. It’s called subsidiarity — the principle that every problem should be solved at the lowest level capable of handling it:
The family handles what it can.
The church handles what the family cannot.
The community handles what the church cannot.
Government handles what no one else can — and nothing more.
Alexis de Tocqueville saw this principle alive when he visited America in the 1830s. He marveled at it — churches, families, and local associations doing the heavy lifting on social problems without waiting for distant bureaucrats. He contrasted it explicitly with France, where authority flowed from the top down, and civil society had withered beneath it. He thought America had figured something out that France hadn’t. He was right.
And then we threw it away.
The people who threw it away were adherents to what I call Scientific Progressivism. Their claim was that the organic, bottom-up, locally accountable way communities had organized for centuries was declared irrational. Inefficient. Sentimental. The experts would handle it now. They displaced the institutions that actually knew the people they were supposed to help, replacing them with people who process applications. People who will never sit in your pew, never know your name, and are completely insulated from the weight of their decisions.
As government grew, civil society shrank. Every function the state absorbed was one that the church and the community had stopped performing. At first, because they didn’t have to, after all, the government had just promised to conduct a war on poverty and end it. But Today, after all these government failures, maybe it’s because they forgot how.
The housing shortage we’re living with right now — the unaffordable rents, the missing starter homes, the families doubling up, the seniors sleeping in church parking— is the direct, predictable result of replacing institutions that knew how to love their neighbors with a bureaucracy that can only process applications.
Faith in Action
When the government gets out of the way, churches deliver.
In San Diego, Bethel AME Church — a 136-year-old Black congregation in Logan Heights — looked at a vacant lot they owned and built Bethel One: 26 units of permanent housing for low-income veterans and seniors. No government subsidies. No tax credits. Entirely privately funded. It was completed in late 2025.
Cost per unit: around $275,000. Publicly funded affordable housing in San Diego routinely runs $750,000 per unit or more. When the church spends its own money — donations and loans from its own community — every extra dollar comes straight out of its own pocket. They have every reason to keep costs down and get it done. When the government spends other people’s money, those incentives disappear.
The difference wasn’t the mission. Every church in this story had the same commandments from Jesus they were attempting to follow; every government is trying to help the same impoverished folks. The difference was that Bethel AME’s land was already zoned for residential use, so they faced minimal barriers in bringing the vision to life.
Remove those barriers, and churches will move—delivering cheaper, faster, and more immediate care to the very people we claim we want to help.
A Movement That Needs Some Faith
Something is happening in this country. It’s quiet right now. But it’s real.
Florida has been peeling back the planning state’s grip on church land for four straight years — methodically, deliberately, piece by piece. This year they passed Live Local 4.0: a statewide mandate giving qualifying church property the right to build housing without a variance, without years of waiting. The House voted 98 to 4. The Senate, 35 to 0. That’s not a close call. That’s a consensus breaking through.
Virginia just passed its own Faith in Housing bill. A hard-won victory built directly on the determined struggle of congregations like Clarendon Presbyterian in Arlington. The new law eliminates the rezoning requirement for churches that want to build housing on land they already own.
Now the next congregation won’t have to burn hundreds of thousands of dollars in pointless fights with local governments just to love their neighbors.
Connecticut is moving. New York is pushing. A federal bill has been introduced. Legislators and churches across the country are looking at their land and asking the same question: Why are we waiting for permission to love our neighbors?
Thousands of congregations are sitting on land they own, in the heart of communities they’ve served for generations — with the relationships, the accountability, and the mission already in place. Ready to do what the government has spent decades failing to do. With their own land, their own people, and their own sense of responsibility.
There’s a depressing irony here. Much of the early momentum for Faith in Housing legislation has come from identifiably left-leaning states and progressive congregations—places like Connecticut, New York, and Arlington, Virginia. And that makes sense — where government has crowded out civil society the hardest, the pressure to reclaim it builds the fastest.
But the real opportunity isn’t just there. It’s in red and purple America, where the church is even stronger, the land is more plentiful, and the instinct to solve problems through family, congregation, and community is still alive and well. It’s just in a state of amnesia, and waiting for permission it was never supposed to need.
I believe that moment is coming. When America’s churches everywhere start to act again in their just social role, to do something incredible and take back charity and community service. Reviving subsidiarity in America again.
Your state could be next.
The American Dream isn’t dead. It’s being blocked — by rules we made, which means they’re rules we can change. And the people most ready to prove it aren’t lobbyists, developers, local, state, or federal agencies. They’re pastors. They’re deacons. They’re congregations that have been watching their neighbors struggle and have been told, year after year, that they need to ask permission first.
They’re done asking.
The question now is whether the government is ready to get out of the church’s way.
