As shrinking membership and soaring costs doom houses of worship across Canada, a new idea is offering some a way to survive while also helping to solve a chronic shortage of affordable housing.
The basic idea is to replace financially challenged churches and synagogues with new buildings combining worship space, market-price and affordable housing, as well as stores and offices. The result can give congregations new income streams to replace declining memberships while removing the costs of maintaining old buildings.
Such redevelopments have been tried several times in the United States but are unknown in Canada. That is something Toronto-based Kehilla Residential Programme, UJA Federation’s community housing agency, wants to change.
The organization took the idea to the Jewish community in a recent program it entitled “Synagogues and Parking Lots.” It was a challenge to land-rich but cash-poor synagogues to redefine themselves while helping to ease a growing national housing problem.
“Although each faith-based property is unique, opportunities to leverage one’s land for social purpose real estate exist in many circumstances, offering significant benefits to our communities and city,” the organization noted.
Statistics Canada figures from the 2016 census show part of the problem. The survey found over 1.3 million households across the country are spending over 30 per cent of their income on housing. It also found the problem is especially acute in Canada’s largest cities.
In 2019, the National Trust for Canada estimated 9,000 church buildings across the country will be converted or redeveloped for other uses by the end of this decade.
Maurice Wager, founder and former president of real estate development company Collecdev, told the conference that since Toronto is expected to grow by 1 million new residents over the next decade, the time for action is now.
“We’re going to see that growth continue aggressively,” he said. “We are going to face serious challenges because of that.”
Around Toronto, several churches are pushing redevelopment plans in the hopes of making a difference between finding a future and dissolution.
A redevelopment plan at Toronto’s Bloor Street United Church, for example, includes space for the church as well as 42,000-square-feet of office space and a 29-storey residential tower.
That project has a Jewish connection because the church is also home to City Shul, a Reform congregation.
Another, St. Monica’s Roman Catholic Church on Broadway Avenue, would see the existing church demolished and rebuilt next to a 44-storey condominium tower. The residential part of the project would include a centre for retired priests.
In both cases, Wager said, “we are planning for something that will let these entities exist in perpetuity.”
Finding that path into the future is also the goal of Toronto’s Weston Park Baptist Church. The west-end institution is studying a project to build a new church, retail, and recreational centre. Ideas are being shopped around the neighbourhood with a goal to getting final approval in 2022 and finishing a new building within five years.
The redevelopment option has also worked for New York City’s Congregation Shaare Zedek. In 2016 the synagogue was facing serious financial trouble and eventual dissolution. Its hope for the future was pinned on a proposed partnership with a developer and plans for a complex that would house the shul and an apartment complex.
Today the congregation has three floors of a new building that includes 20 luxury apartments.
The alternative to such redevelopments is for congregations to simply vanish from the landscape. That is what happened to Toronto’s Shaar Shalom synagogue, which faced declining membership and closed in 2016, selling to a developer.
While few Jewish congregations in Canada have taken up the redevelopment challenge, Lisa Lipowitz, director of operations for Kehilla, said in an email exchange the opportunity is real.
Redevelopment plans are not easy to execute, Wager said, adding any congregation considering such a move should partner with a private firm that can quarterback a plan through the complicated approvals process and help to locate needed funding.
“Costs are rising all the time, so this is not something that can be done by fundraising at the community level,” he said. “This is not an easy process. The challenges are multi-pronged at all levels.”
Tim Blair, CEO of United Property Resource Corporation, the United Church of Canada’s social development arm, highlighted some of those problems when he said a redevelopment proposal for Bloor Street United took 12 years of planning to get a shovel in the ground.
“Volunteers just haven’t been able to carry these projects through,” he said. “Typically, congregations are land-rich and cash-poor, and the development process is very cash intensive. That’s why congregations often need a quarterback to drive these plans forward.”
