When it comes to location, some might say the siting of Clarendon Presbyterian was divinely inspired. The church sits on a triangle of land formed by the angled intersection of North Irving and North Jackson Streets. From the northern point of the triangle, the stone structure looks a little like it’s sitting at the tip of a peninsula, with single-family homes lining it on both sides.
Founded in 1924, the church has what most houses of worship want: to be visible and prominent in their communities. Since ancient times, church steeples have stood out in the landscape for a reason; they remind people to put their minds toward God and heaven, but they also show them how to get to the front door.
Over the last few decades, however, declining church attendance and lower revenue have left many churches at a difficult crossroads. With fewer folks in the pews, how do they keep the doors open? How do they maintain a connection with their mission and their communities? Often, like Clarendon Presbyterian, these organizations are sitting on prime real estate, boasting a large chapel building, office and multipurpose space, or perhaps a rectory or ancillary structures.
For a growing number of church organizations, the answer to their conundrum lies in redevelopment. Clarendon Presbyterian is now planning a new multistory structure that includes affordable housing for LGBTQ+ seniors. The proposal, and others like it, is raising questions about the roles that a church plays in a community, how much density is too much, and who decides.
According to data compiled by the Association of Religious Data Archives, Arlington County was home to 120 congregations across a range of faiths in 2020 (the last year data was available), from mainline and evangelical Protestant denominations to Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, Mormon and other groups.
Nearly 35% of Arlington’s population participates in faith communities, according to the association—a percentage that has stayed fairly stable and has even grown somewhat alongside the county population as a whole, up slightly from 31% in 2010.
The makeup of those groups has evolved somewhat. In 1980, more than 28% of county residents identified as mainline or evangelical Protestant, but by 2020, Protestants accounted for a lesser 15.5%. Catholic adherents have stayed fairly steady, representing 18% of the population in 1980 and 15.7% in 2020.
Nationwide, religious observation has generally declined. According to Gallup polling data, the share of Americans who attend weekly church services dropped from 34% in 1992 to 21% in 2023, while the percentage who never attend services rose from 14% to 31% in the same time period. And whereas 58% of Americans considered religion to be “very important” in 1992, that number has since fallen to 45%.
Although about 75% still identify with a particular religion, regardless of worship attendance, that number has also decreased. Twenty-five years ago it was 91%, according to polling data.
The reasons for our society’s changing faith habits are many and diverse. Religious scholars point to declining trust in organized religion because of high-profile scandals, increasing interest in individualized and secular activities, and a more diverse population, among other factors.
Faced with dwindling attendance, a profitable way forward for a growing number of religious organizations is to redevelop their properties to include affordable housing or other community-oriented uses that faith groups say align with their mission and principles.
In Arlington, several such projects are either completed or in the planning stages—including those at the First Baptist Church of Clarendon, Arlington Presbyterian Church, St. Charles Catholic Church and the Ballston Central United Methodist Church. Other nonprofits with significant real estate, such as the Melwood property in South Arlington, are advancing similar proposals.
Advocates view these conversions as a win-win. They’re filling a critical community need by addressing the housing crisis—which Arlington County Board Chair Takis Karantonis recently said was a top priority for his term—while liquidating a church’s real estate assets and keeping it in the black.
In a riff on the classic NIMBY/YIMBY phraseology, church redevelopment proponents have coined their own acronym—YIGBY—which stands for “Yes, in God’s Backyard.” (The name YIGBY has been trademarked by a San Diego housing organization, but that hasn’t stopped others from using it.)
“If you open up any kind of newspaper today, or listened to the presidential debates, vice presidential debates, red states, blue states, tribal areas, suburb, rural, everyone is talking about affordable housing,” says Carmen Romero, president of the nonprofit True Ground Housing Partners (formerly the Arlington Partnership for Affordable Housing).
True Ground has been the nonprofit development partner for several of these types of rebuilding projects, including Arlington Presbyterian just off of Columbia Pike (now home to an affordable housing complex called Gilliam Place) and Clarendon Presbyterian.
As a percentage of the total housing supply, Arlington’s stock of affordable housing has seen modest growth in recent years. It now accounts for about 15% of homes countywide. (“Affordable,” in this case, refers to rents priced to accommodate people who earn 80% or less than the area median income, or AMI, acknowledging that 80% of AMI is still out of reach for many.)
Concerns about the soaring cost of living here are what prompted the ongoing and acrimonious debates about Arlington’s Expanded Housing Options, or EHO (aka the “missing middle”) zoning ordinance, which is currently on hold after a court injunction last fall. The church debate is an extension of those considerations.
According to a 2019 study by the Urban Institute, faith institutions own nearly enough vacant parcels in the Washington, D.C., metro area to build between 43,000 and 108,000 low-cost housing units. And that’s not including land occupied by houses of worship whose congregations may be dwindling.
Converting underused, church-owned spaces to affordable housing “is fundamental to how we are going to move this country forward,” Romero says. “Partnering with houses of worship is a key to unlocking the land piece of it. Because part of the issue we have is there’s not enough supply of housing. It’s a basic supply and demand equation. How do we, as partners in this community, work with a pastor or house of worship that feels called to serve and meet that need?”
Clarendon Presbyterian’s current building, like a lot of housing and institutional buildings in Arlington, dates to the mid-20th century. This was a boom time for the Christian church, when numerous new buildings were erected in the burgeoning suburbs.
But society has evolved quite a bit since then. Clarendon Presbyterian’s congregation now sits at about 65 people, according to Pastor Alice Tewell. The church is part of More Light Presbyterians, a faction of the sect that celebrates LGBTQ+ congregants.
In 2023, the church’s parishioners voted 90% in favor of selling its property to True Ground Housing Partners for the construction of affordable senior housing that is specifically welcoming to LGBTQ+ seniors. The process would require a change to the property’s current zoning to allow for increased density.
“For the last 40 years, the church, engaging in different mission studies, has explored these central questions,” Tewell says. “For Clarendon Presbyterian, a small and mighty LGBTQ+ celebrating congregation, what does our faith in action look like for Arlington County? What does God’s embodied love look like for the world? How are we called to seek to embody that grace, justice and love?”
Tewell points to county statistics indicating that three quarters of Arlington seniors spend more than 30% of their income on housing. The segment of the population forecasted with the highest growth rate is households 85 years of age and older, anticipated to grow by nearly 81% to 3,250 by 2040.
“For LGBTQIA+ elders, the statistics are even more daunting,” Tewell says. “There is no explicitly LGBTQ+ affirming affordable senior housing in Arlington or the region.”
Although still in the conceptual stages, a rendering of Clarendon Presbyterian’s proposed development shows a six-story building filling most of the triangle lot, matching the height of the multifamily buildings just to the south of 13th Street, but dwarfing the church building on the lot’s northern point and most of the houses on either side. The concept drawing does note that several of the residences flanking the property are either multifamily structures or townhomes, indicating a mix of housing types.
Architect Michael Foster is principal of MTFA Architecture in Arlington. His firm designed the redevelopment plan for First Baptist Church in Clarendon to include what is now called VPoint Apartments. Foster argues it’s essential that these historic buildings—and the cultural role they play in a community—are preserved, and better yet, adaptively reused.
“Every time you lose one of these places, it’ll never happen again,” he says. “Because if it was now, [community groups such as] churches and Boys and Girls Clubs and daycare and Goodwill would be paying retail prices for that real estate.”
“We try to step up when someone has a bold vision for a need that they feel called to address, and we bring our technical expertise,” says True Ground’s Romero. “But it’s more than that, right? It’s about being able to walk alongside folks. These churches that we’ve partnered with have been around a hundred years in their communities. That’s a big move to talk about tearing down your church and re-imagining it to be worship space plus housing, or worship space plus a daycare and all these things. But we feel like that’s part of the value we can add to this community.”
They’re big moves, indeed—the kind that some citizens say violate the county’s established zoning code. More than that, opponents argue such projects are irrevocably changing the character of the local landscape.
In 2023, a group called Lyon Village Neighbors launched a petition on Change.org titled “Stop High Rises in Arlington Residential Neighborhoods.” The complaint was waged in opposition to Clarendon Presbyterian’s proposed redevelopment project, stating that it “will have serious detrimental effects on our community’s character, quality of life, and historical heritage.” To date, 1,157 people have signed the petition.
The objections, in this case, are to the county’s growing inclination to approve new high-rise, high-density development without attendant increases in parkland, schools, parking spaces or infrastructure.
Critics contend that the county routinely makes exceptions to established zoning codes—such as the General Land Use Plan (GLUP)—to allow for such developments, and that these exceptions are adding up to a backdoor subversion of the code.
“Whether it’s a church or [a nonprofit like] Melwood, there is a lot of bending of the rules,” says Natalie Roy, a local real estate agent and Lyon Park resident. Roy ran for the county board on a platform that included addressing the need for affordable housing, but by “engaging all stakeholders,” a necessary step she says is lacking in some of these current projects.
“That’s what happened with EHO,” she contends. “It’s really not checking in on what the public wants, and it’s not being transparent, and in a lot of cases, throwing up social justice arguments.”
When a church wants to have its land rezoned to allow for a much bigger structure, she says, “You do have to talk about parking, stormwater issues, the grid…the essential services that we all expect from a well-run county. Planning is imperative.”
At the same time, she adds, “I think there are creative things we should be doing. We’re behind Alexandria and D.C. on that front. I do think there is an openness to the idea that density is good to increase our tax base, and the churches are hearing this message.”
Anne Bodine, a spokesperson for Arlingtonians for our Sustainable Future (ASF), a watchdog group that has requested more transparency from the county in how it assesses and responds to these kinds of proposals, shares Roy’s concerns about the impact on county services. Bodine worries that the amount of dedicated parkland and the number of classrooms in Arlington’s public schools aren’t growing apace with new development.
“The population is growing,” she says, “but the infrastructure is not growing, and that’s out of sync.”
In February 2023, ASF published a paper, which it sent to the county board, about zoning exceptions called “Special GLUP” actions.
“A new special GLUP application for a church site in Lyon Village, if approved, would ignore local residents’ assertion that the Clarendon Sector Plan…is the current and comprehensive land use planning policy approved by the County Board related to the Property,” the report states.
The problem, Bodine explains, is a lack of predictability, consistency and communication that undermines community trust, while irrevocably changing neighborhood character.
Lyon Village resident and community activist Celina Penovi says a separate group of neighbors has similarly submitted letters and testimony to the county board, along with two legal analyses in opposition to the Clarendon Presbyterian project. A petition appended to the legal analysis includes 220 signatures of residents in Lyon Village and other Arlington neighborhoods.
“This analysis demonstrates that the proposal violates practically every established Arlington policy, regulation, applicable law, practice and precedent,” the document states, including failing to meet established requirements for parking, tree canopy, density and other considerations.
Standing on a street corner a few yards from Clarendon Presbyterian, Bob Braddock is talking about edges. Not just the edges of buildings and streets, but the edges of neighborhoods—and why they’re important.
We’ve been taking a short walk around the block when he stops and points north toward a thicket of low-lying single-family homes. Then he points south, toward the Clarendon Metro station, where higher-density office and residential buildings form a more vertical profile.
“What you’ll probably notice, and the most important thing to understand about this, is that we’re in a neighborhood,” says Braddock, a residential architect and an officer in the Lyon Village Citizens’ Association. “We’re on the edge of an edge. The next street is the edge of the neighborhood.”
He’s among those who have expressed concerns about the church redevelopment project.
“This may seem like it’s just a Lyon Village issue, but it’s not,” he says. “It affects all of Arlington. If this is allowed, it sets a precedent.”
The county planning office, for its part, says it reviews proposals from all entities, including faith-based organizations, through legally established processes.
“The necessary course of action varies from project to project but may include building and other permit reviews, site plan reviews, form-based code reviews, and special land use studies,” Anthony Fusarelli, Jr., Arlington County planning director, said in an email.
“This allows county government, advisory commissions and community members to consider the project’s appropriateness, including how well it aligns with the county’s vision and plans for an area, and with community priorities such as health, safety, an adequate and accessible housing supply, racial and other forms of equity, livability, energy efficiency and economic resilience.”
When asked to address citizen concerns about special GLUP exceptions, Fusarelli added that “the county evaluates whether a proposed rezoning and site plan development proposal is consistent with the comprehensive plan, and any other applicable planning guidance for the area. Further, county service providers of critical infrastructure regularly coordinate with planners to confirm the long-range forecasts for population, household and employment growth,” he said. “The review process also incorporates public engagement, where a diverse range of community members provide input on proposed projects.”
Lots of eyes will be watching to see if that happens, and many intend to weigh in if it does—in public conversations about Clarendon Presbyterian and other faith-based projects around the county.
“Clarendon Presbyterian Church deeply desires to be a good neighbor,” Pastor Tewell says. “There has been tremendous support of our parishioners for the proposed redevelopment.”
Romero of True Ground Housing Partners says there’s a reason these projects often take years to come to fruition. She stresses that she and her colleagues strive to forge solutions that satisfy as many stakeholders as possible, and doing so takes time.
“It’s not a short process,” she acknowledges. “I know people are always anxious. We play the long game. We really are careful to be patient and not rush. The intentionality and the concept and the feasibility work are all really important.”
Kim O’Connell is a writer based in Aurora Highlands.