Faith & Home

Faith & Home is a partnership between SCL and the Lehigh Conference of Churches (LCOC), a nonprofit coalition, representing more than 100 congregations across the Lehigh Valley. The project uses design research to help faith communities navigate two converging pressures reshaping small and mid-sized American cities: a deepening affordable housing crisis and a period of institutional transition for the congregations that steward much of these cities' land.

Housing costs have outpaced incomes for nearly a decade, leaving households at nearly every income level cost-burdened and communities without enough housing supply. At the same time, many mainline Protestant congregations – among the largest non-public landholders in these cities – are confronting continued membership decline. Nationally, these denominations are losing roughly 1.2 million attendees a year, and congregations are stewarding aging sanctuaries, classrooms, parking lots, and parish houses that increasingly exceed their capacity to maintain, even as those buildings remain embedded in neighborhood life and memory.

These two pressures are rarely addressed together. Housing strategies seldom account for faith-owned land, and congregations facing institutional transition rarely have access to the design expertise needed to reimagine their properties. Yet this moment of overlap creates a real opportunity: congregations hold trusted community standing, mission-aligned commitments to care and shelter, and existing land and building assets that could be mobilized toward new housing.

Unlocking that opportunity, however, is as much a human and institutional challenge as it is a regulatory one. Decisions about faith-owned land are inseparable from congregants' longtime memories, theological commitments, and anxieties about identity, control, and neighborhood change. Zoning reform and funding mechanisms can open a pathway, but they cannot on their own resolve the internal discernment congregations must do to move forward.

Faith & Home responds to this gap by using design research as a mediating practice, pairing spatial analysis, oral history, and participatory workshops to help congregations discern their own path, translate mission into concrete design options, and build the shared evidentiary base needed to advocate for policy change. The work builds toward both a demonstration project and a set of tools that other congregations and small cities can use to navigate this same moment of transition.

The Pilot Project

Faith & Home's work has two parts. The first is building pilot housing units on faith based property. Our first pilot, supported through funds from the Pennsylvania Finance Housing Agency, is an adaptive-reuse project of an existing church campus in Allentown, Pennsylvania. The second is charting a path for every other congregation facing this same moment of transition through a Pattern Book of design scenarios and a regional Opportunity Atlas of faith-owned land.

Part One: Building the Pilot

Allentown, the Lehigh Valley's largest city, is facing a severe, well-documented housing shortage where rents have climbed sharply since 2020, vacancy sits at a crisis level, and a majority of households are cost-burdened by housing. Recently adopted, the city's new form-based zoning code, Zone Allentown, has opened a more flexible pathway for small and mid-sized residential development, creating a timely opening for this work.

Faith & Home gathers a cohort of five congregations in the Allentown Collaborative Ministries to collectively develop a pilot project that converts one of their existing church buildings into 6 to 12 units of affordable housing, home to an estimated 12 to 32 residents. At least 30 - 40% of units will be reserved for households earning below 50% of Area Median Income. The work includes a faith-based asset inventory of participating properties, site and feasibility assessments, design visioning workshops with the congregational cohort, conceptual design proposals, and architectural, engineering, and permitting drawings. Once complete, LCOC will manage the property and provide tenant support services to ensure long-term, affordable occupancy, and every stage of the process will be documented so other congregations can follow a clearer, faster path.

Part Two: Design Tools for Other Congregations

Congregations are at different stages of discerning their futures, working through difficult questions about what their building means to them, what they can realistically take on, and where their land actually fits within their city's housing needs. Faith & Home is building two tools to support that broader discernment process, drawing on oral history, participatory workshops, and design research conducted alongside the pilot.

Faith and Home Pattern Book models potential development scenarios on faith-based properties, based on the common spatial and social conditions found across participating Faith & Home congregations in the Lehigh Valley, including First Presbyterian Church of Allentown. Produced as both a print and web-based resource for congregations in the Lehigh Valley and beyond. There will be a few public exhibitions of the Pattern Book, featuring physical models, images, and other media.

Lehigh Valley Faith-Based Housing Opportunity Atlas. The Atlas inventories and maps more than 300 faith-based properties across the Lehigh Valley, creating a shared, evidence-based picture of where church-owned land could support new housing.