Making Housing Happen: Faith-Based Affordable Housing Models

The national housing crisis is something congregations and faith-based groups often want to address, yet feel powerless to do so in the face of this daunting and confusing problem. Making Housing Happen clearly shows how churches are addressing the housing crisis from Los Angeles to New York City. The book's three parts motivate the reader to action. The first part, The Foundation, puts a face on the kind of people in need of affordable housing, provides a solid theological foundation for an affordable housing ministry, and an overview of U.S. housing policies. Part II, Tangible Structures, features housing development models, each demonstrating best practices and workable solutions illustrated by true stories. The last section of the book, Intangible Structures, discusses ways that people of faith have created affordable housing without actually building it?for example, by changing laws and designing new structures or new financial tools that have resulted in housing solutions.

Pasadena is known for the Rose Parade, its old money, its architecture, the Norton Simon Museum of Art, and some of the best higher learning intuitions in the country, including Cal Tech and Fuller Theological Seminary. It is not known for what I found when I moved to Northwest Pasadena. I found a city that struggles with housing affordability, overcrowding and segregated neighborhoods. Few notice that beneath Pasadena’s urban forest, some stately old Pasadena homes house up to ten families. Shrubs and freeway streetscapes hide the 1,200 homeless living in my city (54% of them women and children). That number doesn’t include the 600 plus children in our school district considered homeless. In our city half the 2006 State of the Schools address was about the need for affordable housing. Pasadena is closing four of our public schools this fall, primarily due to residents wanting to purchase and cannot due to soaring rents and home prices. (Unlike LA and Beverly Hills, Pasadena has no rent stabilization). The families of many of these students struggle daily to make ends meet. It is for these children that my heart is broken. It is for them that I wrote and edited this book.

I’m in awe of the amazing practitioners who created award winning best practice models featured in this book. They wrote of their own journey into affordable housing, how their congregations became engaged, how they funded their projects, the reality and lessons learned. In working with these authors, I learned of the national scope of this crisis and what God is doing in churches across the country to house those in need. The research for this book has changed my own life. My role now is that of a catalyst to bring about housing justice. God has raise up a team of amazing leaders, and together we seek to help the poor find a voice and help the body of Christ to live out Jesus’ stated mission: "to bring Good News to the poor."