Let SC churches build tax-free affordable homes to help fix housing crisis, bill proposes

A South Carolina lawmaker wants to help alleviate the dearth of affordable housing across the state by bringing churches into the equation.

In an effort to increase South Carolina’s affordable housing stock, state Rep. Wendell Jones, D-Greenville, proposed legislation to grant tax-exempt status to properties used as affordable housing if they’re owned by religious institutions.

The proposal comes amid an ongoing housing crisis that has not only hurt low-income families — earning less than $35,000 a year — but also middle-income families earning between $35,000 and $75,000 a year.

Jones said it’s a plan where everyone wins, including the state, churches and people desperately in need of affordable housing.

“From the state’s standpoint, we have an opportunity to put some more housing in place throughout the entire state,” Jones said. “From the religious institutions’ standpoint, we are contributing to evangelism by serving our neighbors in need. And so, ultimately, everybody wins.”

Under Jones’ proposal, a religious institution recognized as a 501(c)(3), or nonprofit organization, could use its contiguous property — land connected to or adjoining the main campus — for the purpose of building affordable housing without losing its property-tax exempt status.

To be part of the proposed program, units in the project would have rent set for people earning 60% or less of the median household income of the county where the affording housing project is located.

Jones said he believes his bill will gain support, in part, because it won’t take any money away from the state.

But property taxes are not paid to the state, but rather to local county governments.

Jones, who pastors Change Your Mind Ministries in Greenville, said he doesn’t stand to gain financially from the proposal because his church has a small campus and doesn’t have any contiguous property.

Jones’ church “is pretty landlocked to the extent that we don’t even have enough parking,” Jones said. “And the bill won’t allow churches to start buying up property all around town for the purpose of building affordable housing and having that property exempted from taxes.”

Jones noted, however, that the proposal includes a clause that would allow churches to use non-contiguous property for the benefit of the program if the church owned the property prior to bill’s signing by the governor.

Although not currently a co-sponsor of the measure, state Rep. Wendell Gilliard, D-Charleston, said he backs the bill because it could reverse a widening gap between the housing stock currently available and low-income families searching for affordable homes.

“We are facing a two-to-three-year backlog of low-income families waiting for living quarters in South Carolina,” Gilliard said. “And it’s just impossible that we’re going to ever catch up, unless we can stimulate these religious institutions to start doing more than what they’re doing now.”

Several religious organizations in the Midlands, including Catholic Charities and the national St. Vincent De Paul partnership of churches, currently offer financial assistance to help low-income families to secure food, clothes and shelter. Some even help with affordable medical care while operating homeless shelters.

But so far, few of these organizations have taken the lead in building more affordable housing in the communities they serve, except for in the Upstate.

Grace Church, St. Anthony of Padua Catholic Church, St. Andrew Episcopal Church and Allen Temple in Greenville have, in recent years, begun using portions of their unused land to construct affordable homes in partnership with other nonprofits, such as Homes for Hope and Habitat for Humanity.

Gilliard wants to see that sort of participation by faith-based entities expand to other parts of the state, especially in areas such as Columbia and Charleston, where housing prices continue to rise.

Approximately 90% of South Carolina’s lower-income households are believed to pay more than 30% of their monthly income to maintain a roof over their heads, according to a recent study by the South Carolina State Housing Finance and Development Authority and the University of South Carolina’s Darla Moore School of Business. This is also true for a third, or 35%, of middle-income families, according to the recent study.

Lila Anna Sauls, president of Homeless No More — a nonprofit affordable housing developer — said Columbia is currently short about 14,000 affordable housing units. To that end, her organization recently met with a group of Columbia-area churches to encourage them to partner with experienced developers to construct more affordable housing in hopes of beginning to fill the housing deficit.

Although she recognizes the severity of South Carolina’s housing crisis, Sauls emphasized the importance of patience in working to fix the problem.

“I think that what’s happening is, affordable housing has become such an issue that everybody is just trying to figure out what we can do quickly to make something happen,” Sauls said. “And when you’re dealing with (a shortage) of tens of thousands of units, even I haven’t figured out the answer, with 20 years of experience.

“I just know that we’re going to keep chipping away at it, but it’s going to take everybody working together.”