Yes in God's Backyard

And cash rental aid moves forward!

Two housing policy stories to share today — and they’re among my favorite kind to report: practical and possible ideas that could really improve things.

The first involved a 24-hour reporting trip last week to Detroit, to break this news that the federal government is moving forward with studying whether giving renters straight cash works better than traditional housing vouchers. The piece has new details on timelines, funders, research partners, and stakes for the $30 billion rental aid program that turns 50 years old this summer. It also has some interesting perspectives from housing leaders who want to try the cash aid idea but are grappling with their own institutional/personal concerns.

You can read that here.

Something that’s particularly rewarding about this story is that I’ve been following the general push for several years now (I wrote about it for Vox in September 2023, and The Atlantic in October 2021) and getting to see how a big bold idea actually moves forward in the relatively slow constraints of federal bureaucracy has been really instructive. Yes it’s slow-going, but understanding how to push forward these sorts of policy changes despite the delays and obstacles and in a way that can bring about the necessary funding and stakeholders along is I think essential to understand if we want to make durable differences.

I think the people involved in this housing work are very smart and are taking savvy steps forward in ways both to collect strong research evidence and to collect the kind of evidence that would likely be necessary to make any long-term permanent change. I will keep following this for sure.

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Also today I published a story on the "Yes In God's Backyard" movement (or YIGBY for short) — and why building new housing on land owned by religious institutions could really offer communities a win-win-win for the affordable housing crisis.

It’s a neat idea. Tens of thousands of houses of worship could close in the next decade due to declining membership + rising maintenance costs. Building affordable housing could provide these institutions with some much needed new revenue streams, and/or ways to cement their mission-oriented legacies when they're gone.

Building housing on land owned by religious institutions can also provide ways for cities to avoid the blight that comes from having large vacant properties — especially in smaller towns where the structures served as central civic anchors. Gary, Indiana has roughly 250 empty churches. (Earlier this year I also wrote about converting vacant strip malls into housing, and this gets at a similar economic development idea.)

California recently passed a statewide law to make YIGBY development easier and Sherrod Brown introduced a bill in Congress this year to bring some federal assistance to bear. A bunch of other cities and states are looking at the idea, as are faith-based institutions. There can be zoning hurdles, but some jurisdictions are figuring out ways to overcome them, and there might even be legal paths forward for litigation that makes religious liberty arguments. You can read that here!

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I’m keeping an eye on the Supreme Court, which could issue its decision in the Grants Pass case as early as this Thursday. Thanks for reading and more soon!