Sacred Spaces, Civic Value: Reimagining Faith Buildings for Community Resilience

Full Panel
Transcript

Note to readers: This video session was transcribed using auto-transcribing software.  Questions or concerns with the transcription can be directed to communications@canurb.org with “transcription” in the subject line.

Sacred Spaces, Civic Value: Reimagining Faith Buildings for Community Resilience

City Talk, May 29, 2025

Mary W. Rowe Hi everybody, it’s Mary Rowe. Welcome to CityTalk, it’s an important topic that we’re going to tackle today. And as we always say, these conversations are not the end, they’re just the beginning. And there’s a lot of things to uncover. We have some really great panelists to come on, and then we have lots of people in the chat who have very particular experience and very particular perspectives on this. This is not a situation that’s going to be solved overnight. It’s centuries, well, certainly decades in the making. And now we’ve got this moment to sort of reimagine how we’re going to use these spaces that faith communities created. I happen to be in Toronto today, but I’m on route to Halifax later this afternoon, where I’m speaking tomorrow morning at the Downtown Atlantics Conference. I know there’s a number of others here who, either may be in Halifax or are gathering there, and I’m really excited to be there with the downtown force across the country that’s focusing on local economies. But Toronto, where I happen to be, traditional territory of First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples, and home to many, many folks of different kinds of ancestral backgrounds. I think this particular topic is a resonant one with indigenous communities because of the ambivalent relationship that has been brokered over decades with Christian tradition communities. And we may talk about that a bit on the panel. People may have perspectives on this that they want to offer in the chat, but it is part of the great reckoning and part of what the real commitment to reconciliation needs to look like, because faith institutions were complicit with government policy around Residential Schools and the kind of oppression that that embodied, and so that is part of what the faith communities struggle with themselves, and which we, as a broader society, continue to come to terms with. And so, what does that mean for these places that were built by faith communities, invested in by faith communities, financed by faith communities for decades and decades, and now are facing their own set of challenges around how to maintain that. So all the more interesting kind of context for us to put in that and to be respectful of all these different traditions and how we approach them, but also the relationship between land, identity, a sense of belonging, and then ownership, the O word. So thank you for joining us. As people know, please use the chat, people do, they put all sorts of resources in there and questions and ideas. I do my best to feed the questions in as best I can, and we only have a couple more CityTalks left. We have this one and then we have one in June, which is going to be equally interesting around the circular economy and repurposing of materials. And then we’re going to take a bit of a hiatus over the summer and do a little bit of, oh, as they say in common parlance, a rebrand, and come out swinging in September with this kind of format, slightly different, organized a little differently, and we’re going to spend some more time on our podcast platform, so I appreciate there are people across the country who are devoted to this kind of discourse and we appreciate you being, or participating with us, contributing to these discussions and helping us advance this narrative, that what happens in the local community actually matters and that the best innovation, the best solutions are happening locally. So can I ask my assembled multitude to just put their cameras on briefly so that people can see who’s here. And then we’re going to have a presentation from Leandra, my colleague, about some work that CUI’s been doing with partners, all who are on the call here. And then I’m going to invite the panelists back. So thank you coming in from the various places that you are, Nadia, Brendon, Rick. Just giving you a wave, we know you’re there. I’m going to now pass, I’m going to pass to Leandro. Leandro’s going to share his screen, give us a little bit of an overview of the kind of, sort of things he’s been turning up and his colleagues at CUI have been turning up, and then I’m go to invite you all to come back and then give us your particular perspective. So we’ve got 53 minutes together and I’m really appreciative of all the people in the chat that are joining. And also I would say in the chat, if you have a particular affiliation to a faith community, or it’s in your tradition, or you were raised there or not, or you have an antipathy, whatever it is, feel free to put that in the chat so that we know what you’re coming in with, because I think we all come in with different views and that’s an important starting place. Okay, Leandro, over to you. Tell us all about the work you’ve been doing for the last, I think, we’ve been on it for two years, so have at it.

Leandro Santos Good, thanks. Let me just share my screen. All right. Hi everyone, my name’s Leandro. I’m a senior planner at the CUI and I’d like to set up the panel discussion with an overview of our research findings to date. So essentially a lot of this work from CUI and many other organizations really came from this warning from the National Trust for Canada in 2019. An estimated one third of Canada’s 27,000 faith buildings are at risk of permanent closure. From that, so essentially, why is that important? A survey, shout out to Kendra Fry and Milton Friesen. A survey they had conducted in Southern Ontario, they essentially gathered responses from over 900 nonprofits that used space within a faith building. And what they found was that 84% responded that if their faith building were to shut down, they wouldn’t have a realistic alternative for space within their community. So why does that matter? Essentially, with this wave of closures happening across the country, which essentially we’re five years into and building off of trends even before that of church closures, the loss of these certain spaces within these buildings is really going to impact, in a profound way, the health, the wellbeing and the vitality of many of our communities across Canada, whether it’s in downtowns, main streets, or within town centers in rural communities. So what’s the way forward? Essentially what we are making the argument for is what we’re calling faith-built asset adaptation. So faith-built assets, they’re the faith properties, the buildings on those properties and the spaces within them. And considering that many of these faith properties are in really central locations, they can be really highly desirable sites for community space, whether it’s maintained community space expanded community space. There are many opportunities to add housing and there are several examples of how affordable housing has been introduced to these sites in Canada. And there can also be a means to co-locate many different services, whether it is business incubation, continued presence of the social services on these sites, or a wide range of amenities that can serve both the remaining worshiping community as well as the secular community surrounding it. So there are many barriers to faith-built asset adaptation, but really the reason to overcome them is because of the impact of the loss of thousands of buildings, tens of thousands of feet of community space, hundreds of thousands of hours of community-focused programming. We really need to think through when these buildings are going through their transitions, how can we maintain the civic functions of those buildings. And in many ways, how can we enhance those civic functions? So the challenges to adaptation in summary, really come down to the financial constraints. So the operating costs of maintaining historic buildings, the increasingly untenable cost of deferred maintenance, and also declining revenue from decreasing membership in congregations, as well as donor pools for these buildings. What we found in our research is that many faith communities, the stewards of these faith buildings, whether they be the congregations or the denominations or regional authorities, many of them actually lack the expertise to navigate revisioning or repurposing their properties. So that’s the knowledge in development, how to navigate heritage preservation restoration. But also because of this lack of expertise, there’s a vulnerability in terms of these properties being picked up by developers in a manner that doesn’t secure any community benefits from the redevelopment of the site. There’s also issues in regards to navigating planning approvals, the types of uses you can have. Many of these property are zoned, places of worship, institutional use, really limiting the types of co-location that can happen on that site. In order to ensure that these buildings continue to play a role in the civics of our communities, we really need to reimagine the role, their function, as well as the governance. We’re really trying to make the argument that we should be considering faith-built assets as valuable civic assets. Kind of leading into how do we move forward. We have four priorities. So first is essentially quantifying the social impact. So what we found in trying to recreate that 27,000 figure, that is based on pretty shaky data. And when we were attempting to build a national inventory data set, what we’ve found is that there are a lot of inconsistencies in regards to how this is tracked. On the positive, and Mike can definitely speak to this, he’s on the call, we took inspiration from the work of Releven in Montreal to map the inventory of places of worship and identify key strategic sites for investment in order to, for these buildings to continue to serve the communities that are surrounding them. The second priority is to co-design transformation. So when we think through city building and redevelopment opportunities, we really need to take a place-based approach that takes into account existing relationships, historical trends, impacts on contemporary populations. What we really are trying to do with this particular priority is to develop the types of partnerships and relationships that are necessary in order to reimagine these spaces in a way that serves not just the remaining worshiping community, but the surrounding neighbourhood that this building is situated in. I know Brendon is on the call and one of the case studies that we were looking at essentially is the redevelopment of the cathedral church site within Victoria. I won’t go into too much detail, give Brendon the opportunity to talk about that later. Priority three is essentially building the enabling framework. So this is pretty much twofold. One, it’s kind of building the community of practice around faith-built asset adaptation to share lessons, to share expertise, to kind of set that social infrastructure up for these partnerships to occur. There’s also the need for publicly available, accessible educational material. And that’s where we have a case study on the US HUD’s approach in regards to helping faith-based organizations navigate the different grant programs they have to develop affordable housing within their neighbourhoods. It goes into quite a bit of detail in regards to the types of land use considerations you have to manage, the visioning exercise, the partnerships that you have build. And really building enabling frameworks is essentially setting up the relationships as well as the policies and regulation and I govern the use and change on the site of faith-built assets. And our last priority is to essentially secure resources. So we have another case study, West Broadway Commons in Winnipeg, which the church had gone into a joint venture partnership with a social outcomes-focused nonprofit developer out of the University of Winnipeg. And what we found in that is that they were able to, this developer was able to take on the risk of developing mixed market, market and affordable housing on the site of an old parish behind the church, which was in a pretty bad condition. What they have today is essentially a building in which you cannot actually differentiate between the market units as well as affordable housing units. And the common room area on the top floor is shared amongst the residents, a youth hub on the ground floor. As well as congregants at the church right beside it. In regards to other ways to secure resources, we took inspiration from work of community land trusts and community bond campaigns in which folks could invest into a particular community land trust so they can then acquire property. We can see there’s a lot of potential for that to be applied to the adaptation of faith-built assets. And I think that’s all my slides.

Mary W. Rowe Thanks Leandro. Thank you very much, and I just want to do a shout out that this has been a labour, I was going to say a labour of faith, it’s been a labour of love by many, many people that have worked on this project over the last couple of years. We’ve not found it easy to try to get the right amount of data and research and policy options, and so a number of these people that have contributed to this work are on, Barbara Myers I see is on the chat, I think she’s in Winnipeg today, but she’s Victoria. She’s been one of the folks, Milton Friesen, also, I don’t know if he’s on, but he helped in the early days. We’ve had a number of folks trying to just unpack this Gordian knot with us. So I just want to acknowledge that, as well as Leandro and his planning colleagues at CUI. And then the folks that are on this call, both Mike and Rick have been advisors on this project. And hopefully, God willing, God willing, we will release something next week that tries to provoke really creative thinking. But I’m going to start with you, Nadia, because I don’t know if you’re a Canadian. Are you a Canadian? Because I see you did a degree at York. Did you?

Nadia A. Mian I am, I’m a born and raised Torontonian.

Mary W. Rowe Okay, but where are you living now?

Nadia A. Mian So now I live in New Jersey. Okay. Yeah, so I teach at Rutgers University and I help run a research center there.

Mary W. Rowe So this is a question to all of you. And what I’m going to do is ask you all to open your mics, because unless you’ve got a crying baby right on your hip, we won’t hear anything going on around you. And it just makes it easier than me having to say unmute, whatever. Nadia, why is this so difficult? Because everybody that we speak to says, oh yeah, this is really good idea. I did Metro Morning this morning on the CBC and I had people saying, what a good idea? But it seems to be, is it a difficult idea?

Nadia A. Mian I mean, to transition these properties to different uses and reimagine them as community. Yeah, I mean there’s a number of different challenges, right? I mean both internal to the congregation itself and then external as well. And so, you know, I first, this has to start from the bottom up, right. It has to from the congregation, itself. And there has to be consensus there. You know, what would they like to do with their property? How do they reimagine themselves within the community? You know, and that, you know, getting that consensus, but also, you know, it depends. Is this a independent congregation? Is this is a congregation within a higher hierarchy? And if so, then you need permission from adjudicatory body.

Mary W. Rowe Yeah, yeah, yeah people don’t necessarily get this, do they? I mean, this is, I think, the black box of church governance, and you guys are all enmeshed in it So you’ve got all the language and all the terminology. But I think regular folk who don’t have an affiliation or relationship with the church don’t understand, well, what do you mean that it’s not clear who makes the decisions or… And you’ve just said adjudicatory, which is probably the first time someone said adjudicatory on 300 CityTalks. Thank you for upping our vocabulary here, but how do we overcome that, in your work, well, your research? How are folks overcoming all of that complexity?

Nadia A. Mian I mean, so, I mean I’ll let Rick also jump in here as well because he’s much more versed with this internal, you know, and anyone else on the call. You know, but there needs to be conversations that need to be had. There needs to a lot of visioning, a long discernment. So discernment within Church Talk is just this kind of visioning and opening up and…

Mary W. Rowe Within the community, before you even talk to a neighbour.

Nadia A. Mian Yes, within the congregations of internally and having discussions and saying, you know, what, what do we feel, and this terminology is used a lot, what do we, what do we feel called to do? What is God telling us that we need to do and have those deep conversations. And these conversations can take years. Like this is not even something that happens within a couple of weeks. And so there needs to be an entire process that goes on within the congregation itself before, you, know, anything comes outside. And then once it comes outside there’s a whole other slew of challenges.

Mary W. Rowe Well, and, you know, I don’t want to be flippant here, but you know it’s hard enough to talk to planners, but now you’re saying they have to talk to God too. So it just sort of ups the ante about the complexity. But tell me, the work you do now, you’re creating an inventory, I think, correct? At record?

Nadia A. Mian Yeah, so my current research project is creating a publicly accessible, faith-based, affordable housing database. And essentially what it does is it catalogs how many completed, which means people are living in them, faith based, affordable housing projects that have been built in the U.S. over the last decade.

Mary W. Rowe And I guess the question is, we need something like that in Canada, too. It’s one of the things that we observe through the process of readiness doing this research, is that there’s data and then there’s data … Mike, I might come to you next because you’ve been at it for a while and then I’ll swing back to our American colleague, but Mike what is, Relèven’s been at this, you’ve been at this even before you were with Relèven, and you’re ordained. You’re actually a person of faith. So I suspect you’ve seen this both sides now, or all sides now, and I, just as an outsider, not part of the hierarchy within a Christian community, I sense it’s hard to get data, hey? Is it hard to kind of figure it out? Go for it, tell us your experience.

Mike Wood Daly Well, I wanted to come back to your question Nadia. First of all, I think one of the challenges for churches is that they don’t like not being at the center anymore. And so trying to figure out how they fit into society. And Nadia, to your questions of listening to God, I think, at least from my perspective, is that the message is pretty clear. You have to start listening to your community. So I agree with the fact that the church needs to do a lot of discernment. But part of the challenge is that they don’t listen to their communities and they don t understand what their community’s needs are. And so they have a hard time aligning their mission with what their surrounding community is.

Mary W. Rowe Who is the they, when you say they are not listening?

Mike Wood Daly The congregations, yeah.

Mary W. Rowe So congregations aren’t listening to themselves?

Mike Wood Daly Their denominations. Yeah, yeah, so they’re not listening to each other and they’re listening to their surrounding community.

Mary W. Rowe And of course the other thing that the data does show is that those congregations are getting smaller and smaller, like they’re dwindling. So there are fewer people to listen to.

Mike Wood Daly Yeah, so the data is suggesting National Trust for Canada would suggest that about a third of faith communities are going to close this decade.

Mary W. Rowe And what’s that about? Why are they closing?

Mike Wood Daly Aging congregations, mounting differed costs, lack of income from their congregations and that, what I was mentioning just now about their disconnect from the surrounding community. So, you know, the question around residential schools, question about sexual abuse by religious leaders, all of those is creating a disconnect with their surrounding communities and neighbours.

Mary W. Rowe Yeah, people have a sense of some kind of distance or alienation, and as you say, they’re aging out. So in terms of the work that Relèven’s been trying, not trying, the work you are doing, tell us what the nature of the work is that Relèven does.

Mike Wood Daly So primarily, what we’re wanting to do is recognizing that multiple faith communities are going to close over the next decade. We want to work with those faith communities to help them reimagine those properties for social good. So whether that’s simply helping them to use their current properties better and to develop the connections with their surrounding partners, community agencies, where they’re looking for market affordable space and less than market value space. Looking at developing full-blown community hubs where those congregations can step out of the middle of the management of those those buildings and see them as real community space. So even if they’ve got their names on the dotted line around those properties, that they see it as community space and they allow the community to have a say in what’s happening in those spaces. And then ultimately, you know, if it’s possible to be able to move towards housing and to respond to Canada’s desperate need for housing.

Mary W. Rowe Yeah, you know, one of the larger questions that I think we’re going to struggle with here is who owns these spaces? Like, whose call is it about the future of that? And you guys are saying it’s God’s call, but isn’t that part of the tension?

Mike Wood Daly Yeah, Nadia’s response in terms of, you know, that, you know, who gets to make the decision, and it depends on the faith tradition. So in the more Evangelical traditions, often it’s the individual congregation. And in some of the more hierarchical models, often you’ve got to go to a regional officer, or you have to go a bishop or, you know, to the national office to have those decisions made. So sometimes there’s there’s two or three steps that they need to move through in order to be able to make a decision around their properties.

Mary W. Rowe Well, but let me just say that, let me just, as a secular view, though, say that these faith places have had a tax benefit for generations. And so isn’t there an argument that, actually I’ll go to you, Rick, on this and you can provoke back to me, isn’t there a argument that the public actually are also owners of these spaces?

Rick Reinhard I would I would hate to trust a congregation of fifteen 85 year olds with decisions over multi-million dollar assets in key locations. Let’s just be clear.

Mary W. Rowe Let’s just be clear, we have nothing against 85 year olds. There’s a few of them on the call just saying

Rick Reinhard Listen, I’m getting there myself.

Mary W. Rowe But what you’re saying is, it’s too broad a benefit and too broad a mission to be stewarded only by a smaller group, am I right?

Rick Reinhard Yeah, absolutely. And unfortunately, faith leaders are stuck. One of the reasons they’re stuck is they don’t study real estate, or urban planning, or even very much of management or budgeting in divinity school. You know, they study the gospels and the letters of Paul and those sorts of things. And so they just don’t understand this. Municipalities are stuck with antiquated zoning, antiquated building codes, historic preservation ordinances. And I’m all in favour of preservation, but ordinances that don’t necessarily help when it comes to converting churches. And third, the real estate community’s stuck. A lot of it is, the for-profit real estate community doesn’t want to spend decades negotiating with congregations that can’t make up their minds, you know, time is money. And so on the one hand, I’m all in favor of congregational discernment and all that good sort of stuff. But time is of the essence here. When, in the United Methodist denomination in New Jersey, where I did a lot of work, of the 530 United Methodist churches in New Jersey, 20% were in critical condition and should have already been closed, 40% in serious condition, quickly behind the first 20, and only 40 percent were in in fair to good condition. So churches are falling off a cliff right now. As Mike said, thousands and thousands are going to close both in Canada and the U.S. Once they’re closed, whose problem is it? Well, you know, I used to work as chief of staff to the mayor of Buffalo. It always ends up being the mayor’s problem, whether it’s the mayor’s problem or not. And in municipalities, this issue isn’t in the top 50 things that they’re focused on right now.

Mary W. Rowe I mean, I guess this is the dilemma. You know, I feel like we quote Joni Mitchell on every program, you don’t know what you got till it’s gone kind of problem. But even people, and I know that your colleague, Mike in Montreal, Graham, has often commented to us that in Quebec, which is a highly secular society now, but with lots and lots of Roman Catholic traditional buildings, that even people that have no affiliation with that church don’t want to see it gone. So, and suddenly, and I think this is the dilemma we have, and again, it’s existing communities of all sizes. If you’re in a small community, your main intersection, three of those four corners could be a church. And suddenly, your wayfinding is gone. Suddenly you say to your kid, they’re used to going to school by turning at St. James, and St.James is falling apart or St.James… There’s a church in London, Bishop Crown, an Anglican church, I’m going to come to you, Brendon, because I know you’re Anglican. And, you know, it has snow fencing around it. I think the building’s been condemned or something. I remember as a kid that there were all sorts of programs that happened in that church. It was blocks away from my house. And so it feels to me like there’s more at stake here than just some kind of transition of religiosity in our society. There’s something else going on around how the fabric is changing. Brendon, tell us your perspective, because you work in, I was going to say the belly of the beast, but I bet we’re not supposed to say that. But you actually work in the Anglican or the Episcopal tradition, right?

Brendon Neilson Yeah, that’s right. Yeah, and we do have one of the benefits of being the kind of central landowner of all of our land holdings. So a lot of stuff is centralized in our office. Obviously, we still have a need to maintain relationships of trust with all the congregations who are actually on the ground in those communities. But it’s this constant back and forth.

Mary W. Rowe How many are there?

Brendon Neilson We’ve got 46 parishes on Vancouver Island and surrounding islands. So, and, you know, 80 some land holdings. So it’s a pretty big portfolio. And so one of the things that we’ve been trying to do is to think a little bit more with a portfolio approach. And have all these things work together to achieve a lot of the that we hope to accomplish, including, you now, reconciliation, community benefit, affordable housing, and generating a different kind of revenue stream. So if you’re going to try to do all those things on one site, good luck, but across many sites, I think there’s potential here for us to think like that.

Mary W. Rowe That’s an interesting little differentiation you just made. So it’s not one size fits all. It’s not like everybody has to be the same kind of community hub or everybody has have affordable housing. Ah, that’s interesting. So you’re taking more of a kind of nuanced approach, eh?

Brendon Neilson Yeah, absolutely. So we’ve just finalizing a 60 year lease for a little church in downtown Duncan for an affordable housing building to be built surrounding the church, basically on the parking lot and they’re going to take down the hall, they’re going to replace the hall on the bottom floor. And we’re getting nothing monetarily out of this deal, right? Besides, you know, we get a replacement hall and contribute to meeting a very important need in that community.

Mary W. Rowe What role is your office playing in brokering that?

Brendon Neilson Uh, we pretty much do most of it. Like the parish actually does the day-to-day figuring out what operation’s going to look like and helping negotiate that part of stuff. But in terms of the legal and how the whole thing is going to work, um, from a bigger perspective, that’ mostly us. A lot of meetings with lawyers. You’d think it’s easy to give a piece of land away, but holy smokes, it is not.

Mary W. Rowe But isn’t that part of the dilemma? Rick, back to you. And we don’t want to be, listen, I do not want CityTalk to be accused of being ageist. But your comment that I mean, it couldn’t just be a bunch of 85-year-olds, it could be a bunch of 66-year-olds. But the idea that you can’t possibly have all the expertise you need. And I think this is the point that Brendon is suggesting, is that in his case, is it the diocese, Brendon that’s providing that support? Okay, so that you get this portfolio approach, you have the expertise, you’re talking to the lawyers, leaving the parishes to do their thing. Rick, is that a model that would appeal in the United States?

Rick Reinhard It’s got to happen more and more, both in the U.S. and in Canada, but judicatories, meaning dioceses, presbyteries, conferences, and the like, have been very slow. And quite frankly, I think one of the problems is that bishops, by the time they get to be bishops are just a few years away from retirement and don’t want to roil the waters.

Mary W. Rowe So they’re risk averse.

Rick Reinhard They’re risk-averse. And again, they’re not schooled in this, so they tend to kick the can down the road. And for instance, in the Roman Catholic Diocese of Buffalo, my old hometown, the Roman Catholic bishop just announced the closing all at once of 70 Roman Catholic churches in western New York, which is a small eight county area, not even two million people. Now, on the one hand, he announced that because a bankruptcy court judge told the diocese they have to come up with money for plaintiffs in sexual abuse cases. They need to come with $150 million. But in addition to that, the bishops probably should have been closing two or three a year for the last 20 or 30 years because people aren’t going to church anymore. But, I mean, just think about the impact in Western New York of 70 Roman Catholic churches, and it’s a very Catholic area, closing all at once. What the heck do you do?

Mary W. Rowe Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Rick Reinhard And what the municipalities are doing about that is nothing. Nothing. And they’re doing nothing because, again, there’s 49 things on the priority list above reusing churches.

Mary W. Rowe You know, just so people understand the ubiquity of this, that National Trust study that we’re working from and that Relèven had worked from, and that is the best data we can find, 27,000 buildings in Canadian communities, coast to coast, that either have a faith background or are owned by a faith organization, some are churches, some are halls, some are whatever. 27,00 of them, a third of them not going to survive to the end of the decade. That’s, let’s say, so let’s you’ve got 7,500 properties that are in jeopardy. Just take a guess how many post offices there are in Canada. It’s a smaller number. I don’t know what’s happening with the strike, maybe it’ll be fewer, but it’s like, there’s 6,000 post offices. So this is the level of magnitude we’re talking about, folks. These civic assets, these community assets, are going to be insolvent, I guess. Is that the language? They will not be able to be financially sustained. In high pressure real estate markets, it’ll be very difficult, I think, for those congregations or dioceses to resist developer proposals coming forward that will create what the market wants, which is high-end residential. And yet what you’re all saying is, but wait a second, couldn’t we be prioritizing affordable? So Nadia, when you’ve been creating this inventory, where do you see the, I’m going to use a religious term, where do see the signs of light here? Where are there communities that have been able to do the conversion? What’s the secret sauce that they’ve been able to apply to get it to happen more quickly? Or happen at all, really.

Nadia A. Mian I mean, these are all, you know, we’re looking nationally across the country, you know, there’s certain states where we have not, we’ve not been able to dig into the data as much yet. But definitely in some of those in high market areas, there has been a lot of affordable housing and not just affordable housing, but there’s also been transitional housing, there have been supportive housing, there’s been mixed income, you know, there’s been a lot of variation of these projects, you know, and some of them have, you know, they’re not just affordable housing, right? Many of them have community components. I’m trying to remember which one right now, because we have over a hundred in our database so far, but there was one that, they did a mix of market rate, workforce housing, affordable housing, but also an art space where they repurposed, adaptively reused, it was an entire two blocks of church property that they used for affordable studio space, a cafe, a community centre, and so there was a mix of uses going on. So, you know, again, going back to what Rick had mentioned, this is not just housing or just a community centre, it can be a mix-of-uses, and there’s a lot of possibility out there.

Mary W. Rowe Yeah, this is where I’m hoping the design community is getting fully engaged. We know of architects, there are certain ones certainly in Canada who are specializing in this kind of thing. We, you know, CUI is interested in adaptive reuse on main streets and in downtowns. And we talk about commercial conversions into housing and, you now, how can we take these kinds of assets and do different things with them? And we always get from certain voices, oh, it’s too complicated. No, no, it going to be too expensive. And yet aren’t there imaginative ways, Mike, when you’re working in communities and you work with a gazillion designers and developers, and can we, how do I say this? Churches, forget the religious piece. Churches have had magnificent architecture historically. They have been landmarks. It was at a time when we saw the built form as an opportunity to say something, express something. Can these new sites also be beautiful? Can we design them in ways that are really as appealing esthetically as they were 80 years ago? Mike, is it a challenge?

Mike Wood Daly Sure it’s a challenge, but I think it’s possible. And I think that it comes back to how we listen between the churches and the communities. And I thing one of the things that we’re finding to help make that happen is not just necessarily seeing the congregations themselves or the denominations as our partners or as our clients, but helping municipalities see the asset that these faith communities are in their constituencies. You were talking about sort of the perspective about the numbers of properties. There’s a federal study that suggests that faith communities are the second largest landholder in the country behind the federal government. And so in order to help municipalities, we’re working on municipal round tables now to help the municipalities, the planners, the heritage people, the elected reps to begin to see the faith communities as their assets. Rick was mentioning, you know, if a church closes and it goes back to the mayor, Well If a church closes, people are going to be knocking on the door of their local counselor or their mayor to say, well, what are you going to do about the programs that we used to have, the seniors’ lunches and the youth programs, all of that. So it’s a combination of helping faith communities understand how they can initiate and motivate that process within their own congregations. But it’s also getting the municipalities to see this asset, whether it’s architecture, heritage, simply the space. To build community programming and third spaces and housing, and having the communities take initiative around how do they accelerate that? How do they look at the zoning issues and the heritage issues?

Mary W. Rowe What do you think about NIMBY? Someone in the text in the chat is asking that. A convent, thank you for that comment. Whoever’s offered it. A convent potential for redevelopment, I guess the sisters put forward a proposal and then neighbours say, oh no, you don’t. How do we blunt that?

Mike Wood Daly  I’m not sure how you do it. It’s going to, it’s going to exist everywhere. You know, if you have a Loblaw store built beside your house, there’s going to be, so, I think change is the issue. And I think part of it is listening to the community and getting their input onto whatever is going to change that they’ve got input into it.

Mary W. Rowe Yeah, and it’s back to Rick’s comment though, that the mayor has a gazillion other things. Nadia, a lot of people in the chat want to know where specifically is the site that you were mentioning. And maybe what we can do, maybe CUI staff can put your website onto the chat and then people can dig around. Is that the best way? Because people want to know where this one is.

Nadia A. Mian Yeah, let me look into where, we’re still in the process of creating the structure for the website to go on to research site, and so that’ll be up soon and when it is I will definitely let you all know and you can get the word out there but…

Mary W. Rowe There you go, the CityTalkers, you’re going to have to be patient. We’re going build that, we’ll watch for Nadia to get that up. And the same thing with Relèven and CUI and all the different things that we’re all doing, we need to be able to make these things more visible. I think that, you know, that notion about contagion, that when you see something as possible, you think, Oh, and I wonder about that in terms of Rick, the congregations you’ve worked with, if they know that it’s possible somewhere, does that make it a little easier to have the conversation about what might be possible here?

Rick Reinhard Getting congregations on a bus and visiting two or three places makes all the difference in the world. And it particularly makes a difference if the folks who are actually involved in the project do the tours and presenting. I taught a class at my alma mater, at the College of William & Mary this past semester, and we spent time touring eight different church, actually seven different church projects and an American Legion project. This is an important point. It’s not only churches that are experiencing this, but it’s veterans serving organizations and fraternal organizations like the Masons and the Lions and all that who are doing it. And people begin to be able to visualize, gee, this might actually be able to happen in our space. But that goes against folks who are saying, gee, all I, they don’t articulate this, but all I really want to be is buried out at my church without any, without any changes, you know.

Mary W. Rowe It’s so hard, isn’t it? Because as you say, you have an attachment to the place, your parents, you went as a kid, maybe you got married there, your parents are buried there, and so you have this almost irrational kind of attachment to a place, which makes it hard to imagine a different kind of future. In terms of what we look to the future of these spaces, I just want to challenge all our CityTalk listeners to be alive to looking around you when you’re on a street or in a neighbourhood. The assets that Rick is identifying. You know, we do this with small businesses all the time. We say, look at those empty storefronts. What could be in there? Similarly, how active is that faith space? Could it be re-adapted in different kinds of ways? And there are examples that are remarkable. So maybe I could ask Mike, Nadia, Brendon, and Rick, just highlight for us one, can be anywhere, that’s done something extraordinary. Give us one, and then that’ll satisfy people who need to go and have a look. And then we’re doing a CUI road trip. We’ll do a bus tour, but Mike, give us, can you give me one? And actually on the chat, folks, there’s folks that are already chiming in to say, hey, we’re already a community hub. Can you tell us one, Mike, that sticks with you as a sort of symbolic possible kind of what’s possible?

Mike Wood Daly St. Jack’s in Montreal was an old Anglican church that the priest and our now our CEO, Graham Singh, was hired. After they had closed the congregation, Graham was hired to establish a new congregation in that church. And now, right in the heart of downtown Montreal, it’s a church building that is partnering with 100 community partners. And the anchor tenant, one of the anchor tenants, is a group called Cirque de la Monastère, so essentially circus in the church. Montreal is the centre of the circus world throughout the world, in terms of training circus members, and so there’s, I think they do about three or four two-week runs throughout the year. And essentially they do it during the week. And then on Sundays, they consecrate the sanctuary again and are able to do worship and then they de-consecrate the sanctuary and the circus runs for their time. And one of the key things about that is showing the benefit of partnerships with community groups. The church was badly in need of renovations, and so through Cirque du La Monastère, they were able to access arts and heritage funding and able to facilitate about a million dollars, I think, worth of renovations on the building, that the church would never have been able to access through public funding, but an arts group could. So it’s just a really key example. And that’s also, in that sanctuary where the circus performs, also shared by four congregations throughout the week.

Mary W. Rowe All Christian congregations or different faiths.

Mike Wood Daly No, different faith traditions, yeah.

Mary W. Rowe Wonderful. I’ve been in that church. That’s when I first met Graham and it blew my mind. I’ve got to say, we walked into the sanctuary, saw where the altar was. He said, look up, I look up and there’s a trapeze up there that is dropped down for when the circus is there. And of course these are majestic spaces. Of course there’s going to be the possibility for this kind of extraordinary thing. It’s really an enlivening reminder of adaptive reuse. Rick, can you give us an example of one that sticks out here?

Rick Reinhard You know, the first is really simple. Down the street from where I’m sitting right now, Viers Mill Baptist Church proudly shares their sanctuary in their building with four different immigrant congregations. They didn’t tear anything down. They didn’t build anything, but they just said, you know, we’re open to everybody and we’re going to do that. At the other end of the scale, First United Methodist Church in downtown Miami sold their property to a private developer for 55 million dollars and then use some of that money to move back into the first two floors of the building. You know, so there’s all different sorts of, I mean, there’s a big spectrum of possibilities out there. Someone once asked me, can you give me an example of where a church has been turned into a public market? And I said, you know, we can give you examples of where church has just been turned into just about anything. The question is what’s right for a particular space, a particular city, a particularly congregation, a particular funding situation, a particular neighbourhood.

Mary W. Rowe When I lived in New York City, I was close to St. John the Divine, which was the Anglican Cathedral, and I sang in the choir there, and I was astonished at how the community all around that part of New York felt that that church was theirs, that building was theirs. And they had concerts there, and they had art shows, and they had displays, and they had protests, and for some reason, that place had a kind of open, porous feel to it. Maybe I don’t, you know, it’s interesting to know, if you think of the sanctuary movement, if you think of the anti-war movement, if you of the asylum movement, if you’re think of where out in the cold programs are delivered, they’re coming from these kinds of places and some congregations, I guess, are more open to it than others. Nadia, do you have another example off the top of your head or should we wait for your inventory to tell us?

Mary W. Rowe I’m still looking through my database, but no, there’s Emory Church in Washington, DC, created the Beacon Center. And so they had a historic church. It was a landmark, they could not do anything with it, but they had a lot of property surrounding them. And so they built a 99 unit affordable housing, 100% affordable housing 99 units around the sanctuary

Mary W. Rowe Around the existing building.

Nadia A. Mian Around the existing building, kind of like in a sea shape. And then, but they also have community space in there. They’re working on, they have a food pantry in there, a gym that I believe residents can use, that community residents can us. They have an immigration kind of a space for people to come in and get information, but they’re also working on creating like a kitchen for returning citizens to come and use. So a very multifunctional, multi-use base that was created out of their property, which is really great. It took them 10 years to do. This is not, you have to be patient with these projects, right? I think a lot of people think, oh, in a year or two, this can be done. These take a while, right, especially the bigger it is, the more it is. And the capital stack also has to add, right. And so it’s money, multiple different sources of funding, some of which we’re losing right now, which also makes it difficult, but it should come 10 years and I believe it was about $60 million.

Mary W. Rowe Spoken like a true housing developer, the capital stack. We’ll come back and follow that with Nadia. Brendon, was there a particular place, not necessarily within your diocese, but is there a particularly example that you’ve used as a kind of motivator to get congregations in your dioceses to think about this difference?

Brendon Neilson Yeah, there’s a couple in Vancouver that are really exciting. Central Presbyterian in Vancouver, they achieved both a market, affordable housing, and a totally new worship space where they’ve got multiple groups who come in and use those spaces. That one I’ve toured and it’s a really special place. The other one, I think that’s just finished recently, but it’s the Butterfly Building and First Baptist Church in downtown Vancouver. 57 stories of luxury housing, but they’ve seismically upgraded the church and they have some affordable housing as a part of that development too, but a huge, huge project. So definitely check those things out.

Nadia A. Mian I was actually, sorry to interrupt you, but I was just in that building. I was in Vancouver and it’s not open yet, but I knocked on the door and I asked them for a tour. And so the pastor was super nice, he let me in, but they also have a gym in there that they’re going to allow for community residents to use because the local schools don’t have enough space, brand new gym, and they also have a daycare center in there as well, as well as office spaces for the church and sanctuary space that they… They have two sanctuary spaces. One was upgraded and that’s also going to be allowed for community residents to rent out and a shelter as well, a cold shelter.

Mary W. Rowe Yeah. I loved your reference to seismic, Brendon. Keep going, you are in that part of the world.

Brendon Neilson Well, it absolutely is a huge thing for us. When we first started this process at the cathedral and wanting to put a cafe in the back end of the cathedral or something, the city’s like, no, that will trigger code and seismic requirements, which after digging into and a lot of money to actually figure out what that means, we’re looking at between $50 and $80 million for seismically upgrading that building if we did everything, which is just impossible.

Mary W. Rowe So can we just, can we riff on that for a second, because I know this is a theme and I know that Barb Myers and her work with us flagged it all the time, that how do we bridge the knowledge gap between municipal planners, municipal approvers, maybe the province is in there somewhere, maybe funders are in there, somewhere, and the reality of these buildings, they are old, they have different provenance and challenges. How can we make this a simpler and a better understood challenge? Thoughts on that, Brendon, Rick.

Brendon Neilson Yeah. That’s a really tough one. And I think it kind of is connected to a bunch of things that we’ve touched on, you know, the loss of social credibility by a lot of these organizations, I think contributes to it, because people don’t think about it, especially if you don’t think about in a positive light. So, you know…

Mary W. Rowe That’s important, what you’re saying.

Brendon Neilson Residential schools, sexual abuse, you know all these things have lessened the social credibility. So when a church does speak, you know, it’s not met with a whole lot of warmth necessarily. At the same time, I think, you know, if we can actually be proactive and be using that voice in a way that is innovative, that is kind of community oriented, a lot of the things that we’ve already touched on, that might start to build that back. And because I think you’re right, I don’t think people fully realize what the potential loss of these sites might mean for us as a society, right? Like these are spaces, everyone loves to use these spaces for drastically below market space for brownies and dance clubs and everything, but no one wants to help fund them. That’s the real challenge.

Mary W. Rowe And cultural spaces, we know that cultural spaces are vanishing now and where are you going to have a concert? Where are you going to have the poetry reading?

Brendon Neilson Absolutely.

Mary W. Rowe So it’s a bit of a, we sort of take it for granted. Rick, what’s your experience about bridging that gap so that can we get municipal staff and planners, maybe in private practice, to be the advocates here with the people that are in these faith communities trying to navigate it? I think often by themselves, how do we get that broader coalition?

Rick Reinhard You know, my experience, Mary, has been that the city managers, the city planners, the public officials are way more open to messages on this than the religious folks are. You know, and I’ve gone out and I’ve probably given 20 or 30 presentations at conferences or on webinars and the like, and they’re really open to this. The religious folks are the ones who don’t want to hear about it because I think in large part they’re in denial about this, the churches are falling off a cliff. They don’t want to admit that, you know, but in terms of your question, I think what’s important is to have folks like CUI, the International City Management Association, the planners associations going out there and talking about this and publishing articles on it and doing webinars on it. But I found they’re very receptive to it.

Mike Wood Daly And yes, to follow up on Rick’s comment, there are opportunities here in Canada for some of that dialog. So CMHC sponsors a faith-based housing developer, you know, community practice, and it’s not largely attended. There are opportunities to be exploring that through federal agencies who are working on housing and repurposing social spaces. So it’s up to the faith communities to take their own initiative to engage in those opportunities.

Mary W. Rowe I guess the thing is, I think we have to help them. Go ahead, Rick, what are we going to say?

Brendon Neilson I agree, and I do think there is openness, but at the same time, municipalities are still governed by the policies that are in place, right? And that’s what we kind of are running into as well on our rezoning application. It’s like, yeah, like we, you know, the planners are still governed by what the zoning for this area is. And yeah, they can, you know, be open to different ideas, but still constrained by the OCP and by the zone that’s in place.

Mary W. Rowe You know, you know what’s interesting about this, Brendon, and I worry a little bit about this that, you know, I feel like I have to whisper it, that I worry that our preoccupation with housing, housing, house, housing housing is that we’re going to over correct in some ways and we’re going to forget that a community has to be a lot of things. It needs to be housing and green space, and as Nadia said, you want to make these as mixed as you can. But, because there’s such an imperative on housing reform, do you think we might see a kind of forced acceleration and approval? Are you seeing that yet? If you put housing in your deal.

Brendon Neilson Yeah, we are seeing it in different municipalities. Well, two things. One, the province has required OCP updates every five years now. So that’s like making municipalities do those updates. The second thing is that some municipalities are actually exploring, including housing in the religious zone, just kind of blanket.

Mary W. Rowe Okay.

Brendon Neilson Just kind of going across the board. We want to encourage this kind of thing.

Mary W. Rowe A new designation, that you would formalize, that’s interesting. With the moments we’ve got left, can we talk about money, honey? Capital stack. Where’s the money going to come from to realize this vision we’ve gotten of resilience centres, life houses, whatever we’re going to call them. Where can we get the money? Nadia first.

Nadia A. Mian A lot of these projects that I’ve seen, there’s multiple different forms of funding. There’s funding at the federal level, there’s funding at the state level, there’s finding at the municipal level, there are grants, there are bonds, there are bank loans, there’s private philanthropy, there’s a whole mix of different funding that goes into a lot in these projects. Again, it depends on what kind, like how big they are. But the smaller projects that have seen that have been like, tiny homes in rural areas. I mean, those have been privately funded. Those are just working off of philanthropy and donations and grants. So there’s a bunch of different ways, and it depends really on what it is that you’re trying to do.

Mike Wood Daly A lot of it’s embedded in the property already, if it’s in an urban center and they’ve got a property that’s already worth $10 million and they’re going to develop a project that’s going to be worth $50 million, that releases the money that’s trapped in the property. One of the challenges for congregations is that the ones who most need to do it are the ones who at least have the money to do the pre-development work. And so finding creative funding tools, Relèven has a social, $30 million social impact fund where congregations can borrow to do the pre-development funding. And then it gets paid back through the proceeds of the development. So trying to find some really creative tools that help congregations understand that for the most part, they can do projects without putting any money out of pocket.

Mary W. Rowe But again, we need a zero, add a zero to that fund, just saying Mike, 30 million, let’s make it 300. But, that’s the point that Brendon’s making, is that he’s got the lawyers. So he’s figured out how to get all that technical work so that he can then, so congregations don’t have to try to suddenly find a lawyer who can do it. Any thoughts from you, Brendon and Rick on money, and then we’re probably going to have to wrap. Go ahead, Brendon.

Brendon Neilson Yeah, I think it’s right. There is money in the land, but not as much as we think to achieve all the things we want to achieve. Where we’re finding there’s a funding gap is for the community spaces. And so we can afford to figure out how we do a worship space in a new building. But if we want to also have community space that’s available for non-profit tenants or something, that’s where it’s really tricky to find the money.

Mary W. Rowe And I think we need another CityTalk to talk about this, because the notion of cultural and civic space, and how are we going to find money to fund that, wherever it is? If it’s in a fire hall, if it’s a library, if it is in a church, right?

Brendon Neilson I am encouraged that impact investing is becoming more of a common topic and there are these people who are looking for social return from money rather than just financial returns. So I think that is possible and we’re exploring some of that.

Mike Wood Daly I think if we look at portfolio models, we can trade off density on some sites for community space on others.

Mary W. Rowe Yep, and then everybody doesn’t have to be the same. Last word to you, Rick, and we’re going to wrap.

Rick Reinhard The typical project where a church becomes affordable housing requires five, six, seven different funding sources all put together like a Rubik’s Cube, where HUD is cutting, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development is cutting back on some of those funds. However, they’ve expressed to me, they really want to do this church thing. When a church is in an urban area and has, for instance, a slate roof that costs $2 million to replace, it becomes a big problem. When a Church is in Thunder Bay, as opposed to being at the corner of, my favorite church at the corner of Bloor and Spadina in downtown Toronto, you know, that becomes a problem because there just is not a robust market there.

Mary W. Rowe Right. I mean, this is all, so as we always say with CityTalk, you know, this isn’t the end of the conversation, it’s just the beginning. Nadia, Rick, Brendon, Mike, thank you for your work. Thank you for joining us on CityTalk. Thanks to the enthusiastic chatters that are in here. We’ll release a report soon, soon she says, and let’s keep this conversation going. Let’s keep our eyes open to what the possibilities are. Thank you. For providing some hope about what is possible and what the solutions are that you’re uncovering. As I mentioned, we’re taking a bit of a hiatus. We’ll be back in a month on, I think it’s the 26th, we come back with a show specifically on adaptive reuse and the circular economy. And you can find everything that we’re doing on citytalkcanada.ca, including this session, and the one we did last week, and the ones we’re going to do in three weeks, and all the podcasts. Last thing, for the summit this year, which I’m sure a number of you will attend, it’s in Ottawa, December 3, 4, where we’re going to talk about the state of Canada cities and… The obviously adaptive reuse of faith properties needs to be on that agenda. We’re doing a call with the University of Toronto School of Cities for solutions because what we’re saying is that Canada is a distributed network of smart ideas and smart people working and we need to know what they are so that we can then profile those in December. So, someone will put in the chat where you can put your solutions in. Let’s put a few adaptive faith place solutions into the hopper to provide that kind of tangible hope for people. Because I think that’s what religious communities are about. Go ahead, Nadia. We’re going to put your hand up with some hope.

Nadia A. Mian So last, I found that the… it’s College Park United Methodist Church in College Park, Georgia.

Mary W. Rowe Okay, lots of Googling to follow for us to all learn more and educate ourselves. Thank you so much for being part of the conversation about what the future of sacred places and faith-built institutions are going to be. And listen, we’re all looking forward to whatever the future will be together. Thanks for joining us on CityTalk. Thanks everybody.