Yes in God’s Backyard: More Than 800,000 Homes Could Be Built on Land Owned by Churches—Here’s How Some Are Breaking Ground on Affordable Housing

Across the country and at nearly every level of government, lawmakers are embracing an unconventional solution for affordable housing: allowing churches, synagogues, and other houses of worship to build homes on their land.

It’s part of a growing national movement known as Yes in God’s Backyard, or YIGBY. Positioned as a counterpoint to Not in My Backyard (NIMBY) resistance, YIGBY takes a mission-driven, community-first approach, helping religious institutions transform their underused land into desperately needed housing.

The scale of the opportunity is staggering. Religious groups collectively own more than 2.6 million acres across the U.S., much of which is underutilized. That's enough to support as many as 800,000 new homes, according to a 2025 Forbes report.

So far, three states have enacted YIGBY legislation since 2023, with bills currently pending in three others, and a federal proposal working its way through Congress. But the movement’s progress has been uneven. Similar measures have failed in five states—even as the national housing shortage has reached 4.03 million homes, with some of the most acute gaps at the affordable end of the market.

As advocates continue push for YIGBY reforms one Boise, ID-based nonprofit offers a glimpse of what faith-based affordable housing can look like in practice. Its success suggests that the value of these projects extends far beyond the homes themselves, enriching the communities and religious institutions that make them possible.

A crisis of affordability in Idaho

Bart Cochran was born and raised in northern Idaho. After attending the University of Idaho, he moved to Boise to take his first job in real estate. Over the next 15 years, he worked across the industry—from property management to residential sales—gaining a front-row seat to the region’s worsening affordability crisis.

There had always been barriers to affordable housing in Idaho, he says. But around 2016, something shifted.

“What we weren't used to seeing were people working in the community who were still finding themselves unable to afford the cost of housing,” Cochran recalls. “Hardworking families, even with two jobs, were finding that the cost of housing was starting to really stretch their budget.”

Cochran was witnessing the tearing open of an affordability gap that has continued to widen.

“As of June 2025, a typical home in Boise would require 45.3% of the median household income to afford,” explains Jiayi Xu, an economist at Realtor.com®. “[That’s] well above the recommended 30% benchmark, assuming a 20% down payment and excluding taxes and insurance.”

Since 2019, the median listing price in Boise has climbed 67.4%. That’s nearly double the growth seen in other fast-growing metros like Phoenix, where prices rose 36.8% over the same period.

What makes Boise especially vulnerable, Xu adds, is that it remains grounded in lower-wage sectors like service, education, and health care. “In other words, unlike a tech-heavy market, Boise hasn't seen the kind of wage inflation that would justify the spike in home prices."

A leap of faith for affordability

Cochran felt called to act. He launched LEAP Housing, a faith-inspired nonprofit with a mission to “develop and preserve affordable housing while providing empowering services that lead to greater housing stability.”

But from the start, he ran into two major obstacles: land and capital.

That’s when Cochran started to notice a pattern in conversations with community members.

“People continued to bring up churches,” he says. "It seemed like there was always somebody pointing to a church with extra land.... Instead of just letting them sort of be the villain—here's an organization that has a lot of extra land that they're not doing anything with—we were like, ‘We better check into this.’”

He had a team member conduct a research project examining faith communities in the Treasure Valley. The results were staggering: 168 churches with more than 180 acres of underutilized land in prime locations.

“What's neat about churches,” Cochran explains, “is that they were often purchased decades ago, maybe up to 100 years ago.… So today they're in really great locations. They're really ideal development sites.”

The proof of concept: Collister United Methodist Church

The first YIGBY project came together in 2021, on a quiet patch of land owned by Collister United Methodist Church in Boise. Like many faith communities, Collister had more land than it needed but little clarity on how to use it.

That’s where LEAP stepped in.

The church agreed to lease a portion of its underutilized land to LEAP for just $1 per year, transforming what had long been an empty parking lot into an opportunity for impact.

LEAP built and now manages two family-sized rental homes on the property. Rent is set roughly 50% below market rate, making it genuinely affordable for working families in Boise.

For Cochran, the project represents a return to the church’s historic role in meeting community needs.

“If you look at churches throughout history… churches filled the gaps in the community,” he says. Whether it be health care or child care, churches organized to provide what the community needed. But the highly technical nature of housing has created a gap in churches' ability to respond to the current housing crisis. 

“Housing is so capital intensive, it's so technical—how can we play a role in creating solutions in the community?” Cochran asks. “What we're able to do is come alongside the church to be a bridge that allows them to play a tangible role in the community serving the greatest need, but without having every single church denomination becoming an affordable housing developer.”

How the model works

LEAP’s model is simple in concept but powerful in execution. While rooted in partnerships with faith communities, LEAP is not a religious organization. Instead, it acts as a technical development partner, guiding faith-based communities through the complex process of turning underused land into deeply affordable housing.

At the heart of the model is a long-term ground lease (often up to 99 years) that allows LEAP to build and manage housing without churches giving up ownership of their land. In most cases, churches donate or drastically discount the lease as a mission-aligned gift, reflecting their values of service and community care.

For rental projects, LEAP handles everything: financing, construction, and long-term property management. For ownership opportunities, the land is placed into a community land trust, ensuring the homes remain permanently affordable even as they change hands over time.

After all, Cochran says, churches want to be good neighbors, not landlords.

The broader impact on communities

While the YIGBY model is focused on helping communities, Cochran says that places of worship see just as much benefit.

“We are really helping [churches] be able to meet the greatest needs of the community today, but also, in some ways, we're giving them a vision for the future,” he explains.

Some of their partners have seen a renewed sense of shared mission and volunteer energy after building affordable housing on their campus. Some have seen their membership stabilize or grow as they become more visibly embedded in the social fabric of their communities.

“I point that out, because it's not just, ‘we're done and everything goes back to status quo,’” he says. “Sometimes these churches get a new mission, and that's exciting for folks.”

What's next: Scaling faith-based housing development

LEAP’s YIGBY model has proven its viability, and now, it’s scaling. At least six new projects are currently active, with additional congregations entering exploratory phases. 

With ample land and interested partners, the biggest barrier to growth is now capital.

Unlike states with robust housing trust funds or public grant programs, Idaho offers no state-level funding for affordable housing. 

Federal dollars are limited and unpredictable, and most churches don’t have the resources to finance construction themselves. That puts the financial burden squarely on developers like LEAP, which must assemble layered funding from philanthropic grants to mission-aligned loans to bring each project to life.

To meet this need, LEAP recently launched the LEAP Housing Impact Fund, a social impact investment vehicle designed for investors willing to accept modest financial returns in exchange for high-impact community outcomes. The fund allows LEAP to move more nimbly—acquiring materials, securing contractors, and filling financing gaps without relying solely on public subsidies.

It’s a bet that churches, communities, and values-aligned investors can build what the state desperately needs: an estimated 25,000 units for Idaho's lowest-income residents. And if it works, it could offer a blueprint for solving affordability crises in other states facing the same political and fiscal roadblocks.