The Lehigh Valley serves as the starting point for most of the projects within the Small Cities Lab (SCL), though the lab hopes to expand its reach throughout Pennsylvania. One area of growing national interest is faith-based housing. As the country faces an ongoing housing crisis, many churches are also experiencing declining membership. With fewer congregants, these spaces may offer an opportunity for innovative housing solutions, ones that align with their longstanding philanthropic missions.

“They don't really have the financial or social capacity to keep their buildings going, but they do want to see kind of a transition in a way that keeps their missions in mind,” explains Isabelle O’Toole ’25, researcher in the SCL. 

Lehigh’s Small Cities Lab develops and community-facing, action-oriented research projects focused on contemporary urban change in American cities with populations under 250,000. The lab partners with municipalities, nonprofits, industry, and resident stakeholders to better understand the most pressing challenges facing small- to mid-sized cities, working to bridge knowledge and resource gaps. O’Toole got her start in the lab with the Alley House Program which aims to revive historic “alley houses” to help build economic and social resilience while also addressing housing solutions.

An English major, she began by interviewing residents living in existing alley houses and recording their stories. “I enjoyed going into a neighbor's home and like just talking to them or hearing their story,” she recalls.

Now, O’Toole has been documenting the churches’ stories. Her ethnographic research involves interviewing leadership and surveying congregation members to see how emotionally attached they are to their buildings and asking them to envision the future of their church. 

“A lot of the storytelling work is trying to figure out how to get institutions comfortable with transitions or support them during periods of these transitions,” O’Toole says.

What does that vision look like? The SCL helps by performing site assessments, walking through the property and listening as members talk about their spaces. Then they create concept designs during workshops. The next step is to work with the city in anticipation of zoning constraints. 

“There’s a lot of resistance externally from the community, rather than from the city itself,” she says, speaking to some of the challenges with this work. It’s why the oral history aspect is so important, she notes, to make the transition smoother so change doesn’t seem as scary.

Involving community members early can help mitigate some of the fear around development. “There's a sustained multi-year process of getting this done, where then development becomes way less scary because you're seeing it. You're a part of the entire process.”

The housing need is great, O’Toole notes, with over 9,000 units that need to be constructed in the area. The good news is that there are half a dozen churches who have explicitly expressed interest in having housing on their property. 

The SCL crossed paths with Abigail Goldfarb, executive director of Lehigh Conference of Churches, at a faith-based housing workshop. The Lehigh Conference of Churches is a faith-based, nonprofit agency connecting basic human needs to the most vulnerable people in the Lehigh Valley. 

There are more than 145 churches in Goldfarb’s network, many of which support the Valley’s unhoused population through partnerships with organizations like Family Promise. The Lehigh Valley branch provides safe lodging, meals, and support for children and families experiencing homelessness.

However, these solutions are often temporary. In response, this faith-based housing initiative with the Small Cities Lab aims to develop permanent housing and other long-term, sustainable solutions.

The researchers on this SCL project will be giving a lecture in May at an event the Lehigh Conference of churches hosts annually. Two religion professors will also be speaking on the panel to give an account of the decline of mainline Protestantism.  

The goal is to make an inventory of faith-based housing sites in the county and, eventually, the state to showcase the potential churches have in alleviating pressures driven by the housing crisis. There are over 350 churches in the Lehigh Valley, and the immediate goal is to get some of these units constructed.