BOISE, Idaho -- As the housing crisis in Idaho's Treasure Valley weighs down on Idahoans struggling with housing insecurity, a new affordable housing project plans to build homes for low-income families in a nontraditional place: underused church land.
Collister United Methodist Church in Boise and Leap Housing, a nonprofit that creates affordable housing, have partnered to build Taft Homes on unused land at the church property at 4400 W. Taft St., launching the first project of its kind in Boise.
The two houses are part of Leap’s ‘Yes in God’s Backyard’ program, which came about shortly after Leap’s initial meetings with Collister. The project aims to partner with faith-based organizations to turn their underused land into affordable housing for the community.
“We are essentially wanting to serve the same people,” CEO of Leap Housing Bart Cochran told the Statesman in a phone interview. “They have the land but they don’t have the technical know-how of how to create affordable housing. And so we bring that technical know-how, they bring the land, and together we create housing.”
The partners broke ground for two houses across the parking lot from Collister United Methodist on April 25. Each 1,009-square-foot home is planned to have four bedrooms, two baths, a one-car garage and a private backyard. The space between the homes will become an outdoor community space.
The project will bring homes to families who earn at or below 30% of the area median income, which for a family of four is $27,750 or lower. Potential tenants will be referred by CATCH, a social service nonprofit that helps homeless families in the Boise area find housing. CATCH stands for Charitable Assistance to Community’s Homeless.
Each four-bedroom home would rent for an estimated $889 including utilities. Leap says that is about 40% of the cost of renting a similar home on the market in Boise.
To ensure that the homes would be affordable to more vulnerable families in the community, Collister United Methodist leased the land to Leap Housing for 50 years at $1 per year.
“It’s essentially free land,” Cochran said. “One dollar a year is not a lot of money.”
Joseph Bankard, the pastor at Collister United Methodist, which serves an estimated 150 members, said faith organizations have a responsibility to help support the needs of their community. One of the largest needs faced by people in the Treasure Valley is finding affordable housing.
“If we charge money to lease the land, then that often ends up in higher rents for those that are renting the units,” Bankard said by phone. “That’s why we said, ‘Well, we don’t want to make any money on this. That’s not why we’re doing it. We’re doing this to help people that are in need, and so we wanted to keep rent as low as possible.’”
In partnering with CATCH, Bankard said he hopes the homes will go to families who have struggled with homelessness and housing insecurity in the past.
“When you do affordable housing, you can sort of gear it to people that make 80% of median area income more or less … or you can target like 50% of area median income or less,” Bankard said. “But we wanted to go with 30% of area median income or less, so the lowest tier of affordable housing, to try to really help those folks who are struggling.”
A shared mission between religious and secular communities
Underused land belonging to faith communities can be bare fields, empty parking lots or even unused baseball fields. According to Cochran, Leap’s research determined that there was more extra land held by churches in the Treasure Valley than the amount of land making up Boise State University’s campus.
At Collister United Methodist, there were still conversations over what to do with the 0.3 acres of unused land when Bankard became the pastor six years ago. Some of the options were creating more parking, planting a community garden or turning the space into a park for community potlucks.
Bankard had already considered the idea of turning the land into affordable housing before getting involved with the Taft Homes project, but said he wasn’t sure a project of that size was possible for the church. That was until Chris Johnson, a congregant of the church, suggested contacting Cochran.
“Initially, it’s like, how can a church of our size with limited resources fund two houses, oversee construction, do all that stuff?” Bankard said. “But after talking with Bart, I realized, ‘Oh, this is possible.’”
The two organizations’ goals overlapped.
“Churches care about vulnerable people in the community, they care about their neighbors, and so housing is one of the areas that they are passionate about,” Cochran said. “As a nonprofit, we have a similar view in that our goal is to create affordable housing opportunities.”
Since the project began in 2019, the number of people affected by housing insecurity in the Treasure Valley has continued to grow. As the situation worsened during COVID, the pandemic also slowed the project’s progress.
“This is our third year that we’ve been working on this project; it should be done by now,” Cochran said.
The construction of Taft Homes is about 40% complete according to Cochran. Leap’s goal is to have both homes completed and occupied by the end of the year.
While the tenants must meet the income requirements to live in Taft Homes, they will not be required to subscribe to the beliefs or practices of Collister United Methodist.
“Our stance is that every human being is a child of God no matter what they believe or what they’ve done, and so we want to help those that need it regardless,” Bankard said.
The Collister United Methodist community plans to continue support to the families living in Taft Homes beyond the project’s completion.
“We want to make sure whoever moves in feels really welcome,” Bankard said. “We’re not going to force ourselves onto them. We just kind of want to be a presence of hospitality, and a glove.”
Treasure Valley communities join with Leap
Some people volunteer to help Leap, while others offer financial support.
“We hope that a project like this just sort of inspires people to say, ‘Wait a minute, I can do something about the affordable housing crisis,’” Cochran said.
One of the churches to most recently take part in Leap’s Yes In God’s Backyard program is Lakeview Nazarene in Nampa. Contrarily to Taft Homes, the single home built near Lakeview Nazarene, which donated unused land to Leap Housing, will offer home ownership rather than rentals.
“Faith communities can make a real difference. I’m not sure that a lot of them know that,” Bankard said. “It’s a minimal risk I would think, on our part, to do something that’s really a tangible good in the world.”
The Idaho Housing and Finance Association and the city of Boise pledged most of the funds necessary to build Taft Homes: $300,000 of federal funding from the association and $380,000 from the city, according to Cochran. Other organizations contributed a mix of grants or incentives, including the Boise Regional Realtors ($50,000), the Laura Moore Cunningham Foundation ($30,000) and the Intermountain Multiple Listing Service ($25,000).
Part of the funding will go toward repaving and upgrading the church parking lot as a condition for the project’s approval, according to Cochran. An additional part will fund general utility updates along Taft Street and extend those utilities to the homes.
The total cost of building the homes is expected to change as construction advances, which largely depends on the “rapidly increasing construction cost environment,” Cochran wrote in an email to the Statesman.
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