How the crazy increase in housing costs affects churches

Real estate sign

ANALYSIS Nathan Campbell on how the crazy cost of housing in major cities will hit churches. Campbell was reponding to this Sydney Morning Herald piece https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/fertility-obesity-productivity-the-crazy-cost-of-a-sydney-house-is-not-just-financial-20230221-p5cmcs.html

Someone smarter than me should work out the implications of this sort of phenomenon in cities for churches — especially when churches have sold up church owned housing (for church staff) so that church staff could enter the housing market and buy up property when it made more economic sense to do so. There are some other stories I’ve read recently about how it’s now not affordable for the essential workers our cities need to live in our cities; this was about employees in places like schools and hospitals, or like police and ambulance drivers, let alone in more service based industries like the cafe mentioned in the opening of this piece. I think that’s going to be increasingly true for churches looking to employ people in cities. There are big implications for whole church communities in cities where people who belong in those churches stop being able to afford to live in stable ways in community, unless under incredible financial and time pressure — changing the nature of participation in church community life.

The word ‘economy’ actually comes from the greek word for ‘household management’ — there’s lots of interesting things in the Bible about the way people who follow Jesus belong to a new ‘household’ or economy that does things differently to the surrounding world.

I don’t know. This seems like a pretty big deal where church institutions have made some historically not so smart moves around how we think about property and the market, and maybe church communities haven’t had the sort of ‘economic intuitions’ or foresight to see what’s happening around us… and where we might need to pool some resources if we want people in cities to live near Christians who participate in a different economy and offer hospitality and life to those being chewed up by a rapacious economy built around making sure those who are rich never lose money but can always acquire more houses at the expense of those who can’t afford to buy in.

Image credit  Nick Youngson