June 2025 – Looking askance

Houses of God, homes for people

(Reading time: 8 minutes)

New York City is undergoing a “transformational” change in its commercial building sector, The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday, with a projected 40 million square feet of offices scheduled for conversion into apartments and other uses over the next five to 10 years. That’s a huge amount of residential space in the offing, but while New York is an extreme example, it’s hardly alone: the pace of office conversions is picking up across the country, “thanks to the rapidly falling prices of obsolete office buildings, changes to zoning rules that allow for more residential construction, and government incentives that help bring down costs.”

All well and good for white-collar metropolitan areas, you might think, but of what relevance is that to a small, tourist-oriented city like Staunton (or to blue-collar Waynesboro)? It’s not like our diminutive urban cores are bursting with empty space abandoned by accountants, financial managers, software developers, research analysts or other practitioners of the “knowledge economy.” True enough—but here’s what Staunton has that New York doesn’t: a bumper crop of churches, many of which are similarly hollowed-out.

There are 76 of them in Staunton, by one local clergyman’s count. Big churches, little churches, old churches, storefront churches—one church for every 334 Stauntonians, or roughly three times the national average. That’s not because we’re more sinful (although we might be) but simply a result of having been around longer. The result is predictable: while some churches have robust congregations and full calendars, many are lucky to get more than 50 people in their pews on Sunday mornings. We have churches so diminished that they have to share a minister, and churches that have been deconsecrated by congregations that finally couldn’t deny the handwriting on the wall. The rot, all too often, is sinking in.

It’s not just deteriorating church buildings that are going to waste; so is the land they sit on. While some churches have a footprint scarcely smaller than the plot they’re sited on, others own sprawling empty parking lots and overgrown greenery that at their worst contribute to a sense of urban blight. Consider the Marquis Memorial United Methodist Church, which except for one small corner parcel owns an entire city block fronting West Beverley, as well as half-a-dozen vacant house lots across Stoneburner. Much of its two-plus acres sits empty—as does a small, strip-mall type of building that also sits on church land but is used solely for storage—contributing to the overall run-down appearance of the West End.

Although there does not appear to be a comprehensive survey of church properties in Staunton, the Virginia Interfaith Center for Public Policy last November released a study looking at land in Virginia owned by faith-based organizations. Among its findings: that of more than 4 million parcels in the state, 22,543 are owned by such organizations, totaling more than 74,000 acres. “To put this in context,” it noted, “the City of Richmond is roughly 40,000 acres, meaning the identified parcels amount to nearly twice the size of Richmond.” (Staunton, by comparison, comprises roughly 12,500 acres.)

Some of those parcels, as noted, barely exceed a church’s footprint. But 51% exceed half an acre and 38% are larger than one acre, which the report contends is big enough to suggest “meaningful development potential” for housing. And while the study isn’t granular enough for our portion of the state to tease out Staunton-specific statistics, it does report that the Central Shenandoah Planning District, which encompasses the SAW region, has 970 parcels owned by faith-based organizations, totaling 2,741 acres. The median size of these parcels is 0.69 acres, or less than one-third of the Marquis Memorial UMC property—or one-seventh the size of the five-acre parcel occupied by the Christ United Methodist Church, which has more than a thousand feet of frontage on Churchville Avenue.

There apparently is no comparable inventory of church buildings themselves, although national statistics are suggestive. A denomination in one unnamed state, cited by consultant Richard Reinhard (about whom more to come), rated 20% of its 530 churches in “critical condition” (not paying their bills) and an additional 40% in “serious condition.” Or consider the city of Gary, Indiana, which has only 67,000 residents—after decades of decline from a peak of 178,000—but more than 250 empty churches, according to its planning director. Staunton has a more stable population, but that hasn’t insulated it from an overall decline in church membership, and even more sharply so among younger generations. That means that not only are congregations getting smaller, they’re also greyer.

The consequences of these trends vary, and are complicated by other factors. The 75-member Allen Chapel AME congregation, for example, decided to move out of its West Beverley church in 1997, ostensibly because of limited parking and poor accessibility for the handicapped—conditions that were hardly new in 1997 but which became less tolerable as churchgoers aged; that building now houses two Airbnb rental units. But the Bibleway Community Church, directly across the street, appears to have been sitting vacant at least since 2020, when it was purchased by a woman who currently has a West Virginia address. How many other Staunton churches are in similarly precarious circumstances?

Rick Reinhard, quoted above, is former chief administrative officer of a social justice agency of the global United Methodist Church, where he first started grappling with many of these issues. These days he is chief consultant for a Rockville, MD-based group that among other things advocates for a fledgling YIGBY (Yes in God’s Backyard) movement to use church real estate—whether the land or the building itself—for affordable housing.

“Religious faiths face a great mismatch between small, aging congregations and large, deteriorating properties,” he wrote last year. “Developing intelligent reuses and redevelopment of these properties will make the difference between a community flourishing and struggling. Housing advocates view underused faith properties as natural sites to develop projects that help close the great national gap on affordable housing.”

Yet as Reinhard concedes, convincing congregants to convert their houses of worship into houses of a more conventional nature is a huge task: “All too often houses of worship are stricken immobile by their declining congregations. Convincing an elderly congregation to close or even alter the sacred places where they were married, their parents were memorialized, and their children were baptized can be a heavy lift. Faith leaders are schooled in neither real estate nor finance in divinity schools, and sometimes find it anathema to their beliefs.”

For all that, a growing number of churches find themselves in the same financial position as someone working for less than a livable wage, just one leaky roof or burst boiler away from closing. Reinhard estimates it costs upwards of $7 a square foot annually to operate a church (which doesn’t pay real estate taxes), which means a modestly sized 10,000-square-foot building will eat up approximately $70,000 a year just to adequately maintain the structure. Small wonder that older, declining congregations are worshiping in crumbling buildings, or—ironically—that “Small burghs are discovering that the churches found front and center on their towns’ postcards [sound familiar?] are falling into disrepair with uncertain futures.”

A few congregations locally, although none in Staunton, are showing what else is possible. In Roanoke, the former Belmont Baptist Church was converted into affordable apartment units that hit the market late last year. And Trinity United Methodist Church, also in Roanoke, started converting its Sunday school building into 15 affordable rental units this past February. Seven of the units will be reserved for seniors coming out of homelessness, while the balance will be rented to older couples on limited incomes. Prompting the move was a recognition that the dwindling congregation could no longer afford routine maintenance and insurance costs, much less pay for repairs to the sanctuary’s leaky plaster roof.

“Our building was no longer serving us, it was the master of us,” the church’s pastor told a reporter.

Closer to home, meanwhile, the former Wayne Hills United Methodist Church in Waynesboro is now owned by Embrace, a church-affiliated non-profit that has repositioned the property as a community center and food garden. Last year it hosted “Blitz Build 2024,” during which nine tiny homes were built in nine days to house otherwise homeless people in the region. This year its director, Jenelle Watson, is developing a more ambitious plan for approximately two dozen homes to be sited on a third of the 3.3-acre parcel, also for people transitioning out of homelessness.

The conversion of New York’s temples of commerce into affordable housing may seem of remote interest in Staunton, but we would do well to pay heed. “The acceleration of office conversions won’t sharply reduce the overall supply of office buildings any time soon,” the Wall Street Journal acknowledged. “But conversions are already starting to benefit neighborhoods where they take place. By bringing in new residents, these projects are restoring street life, shopping and entertainment venues where obsolete office buildings used to stand.”

As much could be said of Staunton’s less secular temples—with, of course, the added benefit of creating much needed housing.

West End: nothing to BRAG about

(Reading time: 7 minutes)

For anyone looking to understand why civic improvements in Staunton move at a snail’s pace, a good place to start one’s education is with the West End.

Long recognized as the city’s neglected quarter, its vitality sapped by construction of the Woodrow Wilson Parkway decades ago, the West End was targeted by the city council in 2020 as a “high priority zone” for revitalization. That same year, the city applied to the EPA for a three-year, $300,000 Brownfields Assessment Grant. The purpose of the grant, as explained by city staff, was “to return vacant or underutilized properties to productive reuse” by assessing for possible environmental hazards, often from industrial waste but also from asbestos, underground gas tanks, lead paint or other contamination. Site remediation would then “incentivize investment and jumpstart redevelopment and area-wide revitalization.”

Initial progress was promising. The EPA signed off on the grant the following spring, with the study scheduled for completion by September 30, 2024. Draper Aden Associates, a Virginia-based consulting engineer, was retained for the heavy lifting. And in keeping with an announced emphasis on “community engagement,” the city and its consultants planned a series of public meetings over a six-month period “to position the impacted community at the forefront as champions for these revitalization initiatives.”

Study oversight and community engagement was to be provided by the Brownfields Redevelopment Advisory Group (BRAG), a consortium of nine “partners” that would “take an active role in leading the City’s Brownfields Program.” Several BRAG members—including the Valley Mission, the Salvation Army and the Staunton Redevelopment/Housing Authority—dealt with housing issues, holding out the promise that this would not be a neglected focus in a process that could easily favor commercial interests. The West End Business Association and Staunton’s West End Alliance, meanwhile, were singled out as being “strongly committed to the preservation and revitalization of West End and will take an active role in leading the City’s Brownfields Program.”

Indeed, BRAG was to play a crucial role in ensuring that the West End wouldn’t simply become a colonial outpost for a bunch of remote planners parachuting in. It would “meet quarterly to assist City staff in site selection and cleanup/reuse planning,” according to the grant application, which added that BRAG and the city would involve representatives “of neighborhoods most directly impacted by proposed redevelopment projects.” Moreover, “partner organizations like the Salvation Army and Valley Mission will represent disadvantaged communities to communicate their needs and disseminate information, which will be beneficial for constituents with limited internet and/or phone access.”

But of course, man plans and God laughs.

Four years on, the brownfields study is still incomplete. Draper Aden Associates has been gobbled up by a larger firm which, if city staff are to be believed, is extremely slow in responding to information requests about its activities. The planned series of public hearings was severely whittled down over Covid concerns. And BRAG? Never happened. The West End Alliance apparently no longer exists as a separate entity. The other BRAG “partners” never met as a group, had nothing to do with selecting brownfield sites for study, and indeed seem largely ignorant of their supposed role.

The disadvantaged communities presumably remain just that.

THERE IS ONE SILVER LINING to this $300,000 brown cloud, and that’s the redevelopment of the former Chestnut Hill Shopping Center. As it happens, this was one of three “priority” sites identified by the grant application because of “their potential to catalyze additional investment and revitalization of West End, as well as to extend redevelopment opportunities.” That the vacant shopping center happened to meet the city’s need for some place to build a new courthouse was a fortuitous accident, not the result of careful planning, but you take your wins where you can. Will a courthouse turn out to be the best use of that property in the interests of West End revitalization? Maybe, maybe not, but in any case a moot point now.

But what of the other two “priority” sites that were identified by the grant application, carefully picked from among more than 25 candidates chosen for their “potential to change the blighted landscape and revitalize the stagnant economy in the target area”? The first is a one-acre site of a salvage yard that closed in 2011, apparently targeted because of its high potential for contaminating Lewis Creek with heavy metals, PCBs and volatile organic compounds. In other words, not much redevelopment potential but a possible environmental disaster if not attended.

The third of the three sites, however, amounts to an enormous blank slate that could accommodate the most ambitious of developments. Bounded by Morris Mill Road on the north and east, the former Unifi Manufacturing site spans approximately 50 acres and has been vacant since 2008. Immediately to its south is a vacant, wooded tract of an additional 27 acres, which backs onto a Food Lion supermarket, while a connecting vacant lot on the east side of the Food Lion could give direct access to West Beverley Street. Ware Elementary and Shelburne Middle schools are within easy walking distance.

All of which is to say, the West End has a void that screams for development. City maps of the West End core study area and of a proposed enterprise zone look like an upside-down saucepan, with the handle running from downtown along West Beverley, then flaring out along Morris Mill Road to the city boundary. The West End Revitalization Plan has a map on page 28 that includes a large green area, matching exactly the description provided in the preceding paragraph, labeled “redevelopable parcels.” As the grant application summarized, “the site’s proximity to schools and residences make it a high priority for investigation and redevelopment.”

Indeed—but no. The UniFi site is history. Just don’t try to figure out why.

Consider the grant application’s effusive embrace of community engagement: “To maintain progress throughout the grant period, the QEP [Qualified Environmental Professional] will prepare monthly reports to the City and BRAG in compliance with the approved EPA Cooperative Agreement Work Plan, which will summarize activities, e.g. milestones achieved, issues encountered, and budget/schedule updates. These will be used to gauge progress, communicate with constituents and prepare quarterly performance reports.”

Those quarterly reports, however, are too sketchy to be of use to anyone. For example, the decision to extend the initial three-year grant by an additional year is described thus: “An Extension Amendment Request was submitted to EPA as well as updated contact sheet siting a new Grant Recipient Representative.” No reason given why more time was needed—but at least the change was noted. Not so for the UniFi site, which after more than a year of investigation, abruptly dropped off the radar at the end of 2023. The quarterly reports don’t even acknowledge the deep-sixing of its largest “high priority” site, much less a reason for the radical change. On the other hand, the quarterly reports do make sporadic mention of other possible brownfields sites, such as Don’s Auto Repair and Gypsy Hill Park, but again without any explanation.

Does anyone living or working in the West End have the slightest idea that the brownfield study is still chugging along? Highly unlikely. But just as much in the dark are city leaders and planners, all of whom—from council members to the city manager to the head of the planning department—are new to their positions since the grant application was submitted and unable to answer even basic questions, such as why Gypsy Hill Park belatedly became part of a West End brownfield study. This is a ship that has been set adrift, and one can only hope it will eventually touch shore undamaged.

The good news, if one can call it that, is that as of the end of March the study had eaten up only 54% of the original grant money. Of course, that does raise the question of how the city will reasonably spend the remaining $138,000 before Sept. 30—or whether it will seek yet another extension. Maybe it should turn to the West End’s residents for answers. Just don’t look to BRAG for help.