Church in Brooklyn, New York, Replaces Its Old Building With 67 Affordable Housing Units

On a gray spring day, Pastor Vivian Grubb unlocked the side door of a 10-story apartment building at the corner of Eastern Parkway and Atlantic Avenue in the Ocean Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn. A paper sign taped inside the glass read “Faith Forward Community Church.” Faith Forward began meeting in the building’s lower levels this spring. The newer feature of the block, however, is the 67 units of affordable housing above the church. The church did not lose its building to a developer. According to the report, the congregation itself proposed replacing its former building with housing.

The site had a long history before either use. It was once a sandpaper factory. The congregation, originally named True Holy Church, opened in 1952 and met for decades in storefronts and beauty parlors in the neighborhood. It bought the factory in 1993, but with little money for renovations, it could not move in until 2005. The church then spent just over a decade meeting in the old factory before tearing it down.

Grubb said the church’s guiding question has long been “what does the community need?” He said that eight years ago he saw that the community’s greatest need was affordable housing. The report notes that homelessness in New York City has increased by at least 70 percent since 2020. It also cites the city’s most recent New York City Housing and Vacancy Survey, which found that from 1991 to 2023 the city “experienced a net loss of over 600,000 units with rents of $1,500 or less (in inflation-adjusted 2023 dollars).”

Before becoming a pastor, Grubb worked on Wall Street for 13 years. His move into ministry included work with Prison Fellowship and City Seminary, where he still teaches. He grew up at True Holy Church, and his father had served as the church’s assistant pastor before Grubb became pastor in 2006.

During the 1980s, when the city was struggling with the crack epidemic, the church picked up men and women from detox centers each week, took them to a church service, and fed them a meal. In 1988, the church added a weekly effort to pack and distribute grocery bags. Between the two food ministries, the church served about 40 people a week. “We were chest bumping and high-fiving each other because that’s 40 people we impacted,” Grubb recalled. Feeding the hungry and welcoming those in need reflects the call to charity and hospitality (Matthew 25:35).

Today the weekly food pantry continues, but it now distributes food to 300 families each weekend. Grubb said the early pantry served almost exclusively people experiencing homelessness in the neighborhood, while people from many financial circumstances now come to receive food. The pantry also led to the church’s next opportunity. A deacon who had found the church through his own use of the pantry asked Grubb whether the church would consider partnering with a homeless shelter. The Coalition for the Homeless has estimated that 96,000 people sleep in New York City homeless shelters each night, and that 30,000 of them are children. The deacon told Grubb that he had once been homeless himself and that when a shelter is full, it partners with churches, synagogues, temples and mosques and uses them as overflow rooms.

Grubb said he was unsure about the idea at first but recalled that “God has a sense of humor.” A week later, a woman who worked for a shelter operating down the block from the church made the same request: would the church be willing to partner with the shelter as a drop-off center?

Source: Read the original report