Boise church partners to build affordable housing on church land

BOISE, Idaho (CBS2) — Leaders of the Collister United Methodist Church in Boise are working with LEAP Housing to build an affordable housing project on church land.

The project is the first of its kind in the Treasure Valley. Organizers say that churches often have untapped land, such as empty parking lots or unused baseball fields. Collister Methodist church will be building two new homes on an unused space behind the church parking lot.

“Throughout this process with our partners and especially Collister United Methodist, we know that it's not just two homes that we are working on. It’s two households in our community that will now have safe, stable, and affordable housing,” said Bart Cochran, LEAP CEO. “With an unused buildable area of less than 0.3 acres that the church has owned for more than 100 years, Collister is showing other faith-based organizations that they too can have an impact on the housing crisis in their communities.”

The housing project will be for families that earn at or below 30 percent of the area's median income.

“Our council talked through what we could use it for – everything from a community garden, where we could grow food, a park, or a bigger parking lot – but housing was on our minds,” said Joe Bankard, Collister United Methodist Pastor. “Affordable housing was a crisis at that time and it wasn’t even nearly as bad as it is now – no affordability, rents going up, low availability – so we started looking into that option.”

“Housing is one of the biggest needs in our community and we have land. My call to other churches is you should be doing the same," said Bankard. "This is the call of the gospel – that we should be experiencing the world and looking at the world from the perspective of those who have been marginalized, those who don’t have a voice, who don’t have power, who don’t have money.”

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