California churches address housing crisis
Amid rising homelessness, congregations are building affordable housing.
When James Lapp moved to Santa Cruz in the mid-1990s, the pastor saw how quickly housing prices in the Northern California beach city were climbing. If he hadn’t bought his home then, he said, he would have been priced out of the market.
But it wasn’t until several years later, when he got a call from one of his congregants at St. Stephen’s Lutheran Church, that he decided to do something about the housing crisis.
The woman had grown up in the church and was working full-time as a cashier at a grocery store while her husband worked full-time as a mechanic. Even with dual incomes, they couldn’t afford to pay rent and to care for their two young children in a city that had become a bedroom community for tech workers in Silicon Valley.
