Churches, Housing and Rebuilding Neighborhoods

They're building a new part/condo building near a Metro stop I use. The other day while waiting for the train, I thought to myself: if I had a ton of money, I could lease two or three apartments and "give" them to charities or let them use them.

The idea, for me, is to provide more traditional housing than is currently or normally available. So for women who are escaping domestic violence or people who are transitioning out of homelessness or public housing (under very tight conditions, of course), they could have a nice apartment - a new apartment - to start their new lives in.

This also brings up another idea I've had with regards to my own neighborhood. A lot of black churches in DC, where I live, have older populations who have moved out of the city and the neighborhoods where the church is located. I don't know how or why that happened (perhaps an interesting research project) but when the housing market was so low a couple of years ago, I thought that would be a great time for a church in my neighborhood to buy up some houses and place "their" people in those houses, "re-seeding" the congregation in the neighborhood. I even imagined it as a dual-focus project wherein they brought parishoners back to the neighborhood but also provided 1) a start for young people just starting out (a place to live in the city, close to their work [maybe]) and 2) mixed housing, putting young people with elderly members so that those members had a sense of connection and family that they might not have with their own blood family. Basically it was about building community in the neighborhood with the church as the center. I thought many times about writing a letter to the pastor of that church, anonymously or not, suggesting the idea.