How should a Jewish community build a sacred home? What should be included in a physical space that will serve as a container for the community members’ shared life?
My Jewish community, IKAR, has considered this question carefully in the few years since we bought property in mid-city Los Angeles to build a home for ourselves after many years of conducting services in a rented high school gym.
We knew we wanted flexible meeting spaces that we could share with our wider multifaith, multiracial L.A. community, classrooms and play space for our children, outdoor space for gathering and gardening.
We also wanted to build an expression of our deepest values.
Looking around our city and state, it was obvious that there is a dire need for more housing that is affordable to poor and middle-income people. Here in California, we are in an acute housing crisis brought on by decades of underbuilding, excessive single-family zoning, redlining and discriminatory lending.
At IKAR, we decided the best thing we could do with our land in West L.A., which is rich in transit and other amenities, was to build affordable homes for those who are struggling alongside the home we envision for ourselves.
After more than three years of research and planning, we’re now partnering with a nonprofit affordable housing developer, the Community Corporation of Santa Monica, that will build and manage a 60-unit permanent supportive housing development for formerly unhoused seniors. In addition to housing, there will be essential supportive services on site.
It has not been easy to get to this point. Figuring out zoning rules and waiting for our housing partner to win public funding has added time and uncertainty to our project. However, we believe that faith communities like ours have a moral obligation to help build housing — and that we have the most important resource to make it happen: land in desirable neighborhoods.
We’ve learned a lot about the challenges, uncertainties and expense of building affordable housing. We even went to the Legislature in 2022 to change state law to reduce parking minimums for faith communities that are building affordable housing to address one of these barriers.
This is why we’ve also been raising our voices to advocate for Senate Bill 4, the Affordable Housing on Faith Lands Act, supported by state Sen. Scott Wiener, alongside the Jewish Public Affairs Council, multifaith coalition partners, unions and affordable housing developers.
As we celebrate Sukkot, our tradition challenges us to think about how ephemeral our houses are.
Having passed in the Assembly (73-1) on Sept. 7 and in the Senate (32-2) four days later, the bill now awaits Gov. Gavin Newsom’s signature.
If that occurs, the legislation would make it easier for faith institutions and nonprofit colleges to build affordable housing by easing zoning restrictions and limiting discretionary zoning review processes.
It also ensures that the workers who build this new housing will be paid fair wages that value the dignity of their labor.
A recent study by UC Berkeley’s Terner Center for Housing Innovation demonstrated that there are 171,000 acres of land (more than three times the size of Oakland) that would be eligible for affordable housing development under SB 4. Hundreds of synagogues across California are included in that newly opened land, and many of them are located in the places that most need more affordable housing.
According to the study, nearly half the eligible land is in high-resource neighborhoods, and that is certainly true for many synagogues.
In our communities, renters are increasingly priced out, forced to move away, to double up — and some of the most vulnerable have lost their housing altogether.
We can help change that by rethinking how we are using the land we now occupy. Could your synagogue lease its surface parking lot to a developer to build a small apartment building and put its parking underground? Do you have an older building that is underutilized or in need of repair? Working with a developer, it may be possible to bring in money from a lease agreement and new neighbors — neighbors who will breathe new life into our communities as they also breathe in a newfound sense of security and stability in their own homes.
The Jewish community shares a commitment to the values of welcoming the stranger and repairing what is broken and unjust in our world.
We have the opportunity to live out those values in a way that sits very close to our collective homes — by embracing the chance to build affordable housing at our synagogues and other communal properties across the state.
As we celebrate Sukkot, our tradition challenges us to think about how ephemeral our houses are. Let’s use this season to open our communal homes to housing for those who are without shelter in our community year-round.