2025 Cohort Focus: Building Affordable Housing on Religious Properties

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Locations: Triangle and Triad regions of North Carolina

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The single greatest resource for solving the affordable housing crisis in the Triangle and Triad is already present in the regions: thousands of acres owned by faith communities. Permanent supportive housing for unhoused individuals; multifamily residential; senior housing; housing for adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities; housing for refugees; mixed-income rentals; and first-time homeowner opportunities — all of these can be built on religious properties. What’s more, new housing can catalyze equitable development: affordable child care, accessible healthcare, green spaces, healthy food systems, plus jobs and enterprises owned by women and people of color. The question is, How to unlock religious properties for the flourishing of these regions?

 

Sympara offers one hopeful answer: The Sacred/Civic Placemaking Project brings together six congregations and one nonprofit that want to build housing on their properties — Alamance Presbyterian Church, Greensboro; Dellabrook Presbyterian Church, Winston-Salem; First Baptist Church, Greensboro; Guilford Park Presbyterian Church, Greensboro; Legacy Bridge North Carolina, Winston-Salem; Lincoln Park Holiness Church, Raleigh; and Sweet Holy Spirit Church, Winston-Salem.

 

Launched in February 2025, the eight-month peer-learning experience will help these organizations discern their calling to housing, engage their neighbors and other community stakeholders in visioning, determine how to achieve both missional impact and financial sustainability, and prepare for the multiyear journey with developers, funders, and programmatic partners.​

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2025-2026 Cohort Focus: Building Affordable Housing on Religious Properties

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Location: Triangle Region of North Carolina

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Criteria for Congregations: Sympara seeks to work with congregations that have (1) developable property — excess land and/or buildings that can be redesigned or reconstructed to make room for housing; (2) leadership capacity — passion, skill, and bandwidth in clergy and laity; (3) social capital — community relationships that can be leveraged; and (4) congregational readiness and, if necessary, judicatory support — a shared desire to reimagine property for community impact and a willingness to embark upon a journey that will take at least three years beyond the cohort experience.

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Information sessions for this cohort will be held in April 2025. To be added to the mailing list, email Sympara CEO Daniel Pryfogle.