Eli Smith is helping churches turn their land into housing.

Across the country, churches and other faith communities own land in neighborhoods where housing is increasingly difficult to build.

Eli sees an opportunity there.

As Director of the Faith-Based Housing Initiative, he works with congregations that want to use their property to create housing. The challenge is getting from that desire to something a church can actually build.

The Initiative brings faith leaders together with people who understand design and development. Congregations study their sites, sketch possible plans, learn development fundamentals, build pro formas, and create a path toward financing and construction.

Eli helps guide that work with a growing library of examples from around the country.

He has studied tiny homes built beside churches, apartments created inside former church buildings, cottage communities, and larger developments. The projects vary because the congregations, properties, resources, and communities behind them vary too.

That has also led him toward an incremental approach. A congregation may have room for a few homes, an unused education building, or a piece of a parking lot. Those smaller opportunities can still create housing and give institutions a practical place to begin.

Eli has carried the work into public policy as well, consulting on state and local efforts intended to make faith-based housing easier to build.

His work gives another group of local institutions a way to participate directly in shaping the places around them.

The land is already there.

Eli is helping congregations learn what they can do with it.