Yahoo Finance How a Coral Gables builder is winning trust from a community. It involves a home visit
The afternoon sun streams through Faith Community Baptist Church’s stained-glass windows of pomegranate, orange, lemon, lime and peach. In the congregation hall, a group of women from the Gratigny Neighborhood Association sit on chairs, ready for their gathering.
Among them is developer Ellen Buckley, blending in with her J. Crew V-neck T-shirt, black jeans and Puma Carina Street platform sneakers, certainly a different uniform from the suits and stilettos her colleagues often wear to community gatherings.
And this meeting was anything but a typical developer meet-and-greet. Buckley started her day in this neighborhood bordering North Miami and Miami Shores instead of driving from her Coral Gables home. It was part of what she calls a “community immersion” to better understand the area.
That community outreach included something no one in the room had seen in a booming real estate metropolis — Buckley’s first developer sleepover, one where she stayed for two nights at a neighbor’s home and lived the life of people who have lived in the area for two, three, four decades.
“I’m finding it’s so enriching and so helpful to the work I do, I want to continue to do it in my projects moving forward,” Buckley said. “I do this work to bring positive change to a neighborhood. The connection with the neighborhood and residents is meaningful to that work.”
Land for housing
Buckley’s work includes a handful of residential developments in the pipeline, all being built under her own firm Prospera Real Estate Collective. After working for nearly a decade with Terra, the 44-year-old Buckley went on her own in January 2023 to focus on housing projects.
One of those includes Faith Place Village, consisting of 37 townhouses on empty land adjacent to Faith Community Baptist Church at 10401 NW Eighth Ave. The church owns the entire 3.2 acre site, in unincorporated Miami-Dade, and will be developing 2 acres.
Inspired by Matthew Desmond’s book “Evicted,” where he embedded himself into the lives of eight families in Milwaukee, Buckley wanted to understand as deeply as possible the residents in this area. So she let residents define every part of her day, starting off with a breakfast of scrambled eggs, grits, and ham at MLK Restaurant, a lunch at the Bahamian Pot and many conversations in between to learn about the community — where people got their hair done, bought fresh meat and fish, the ongoing rivalry between Miami Northwestern and Miami Central high schools.
It’s all for the sake of research, Buckley said, for her $12 million development. Faith Place Village will include 37 townhomes ranging from a single-story, 866-square-foot two-bedroom, one bathroom residence to a two-story, 1,100-square-foot three bedroom, two bathroom residence. A community garden and a playground are in the works for both future buyers and neighbors.
Aiming to cater to area residents, the townhouses will be priced between $300,000 and just under $400,000. Once the townhouses are sold, Buckley’s Prospera, Faith Community Baptist Church, and nonprofit The Collective Empowerment Group — which connected both the developer and church — will split the sales.
Churches are cash poor, land rich
Cash poor but land rich churches like Faith Community Baptist Church opt to develop portions of their property as a way to bring in more money. It’s a growing trend in South Florida, where several spiritual leaders are getting into real estate, planning on delivering anything from a waterfront luxury condo in Brickell to high-rise rentals in Edgewater. According to the Christian Science Monitor, the trend travels far beyond Miami and can be seen across the country.
“South Florida has exorbitant housing rates. Rental is out of the roof,” said the Rev. Richard P. Dunn II, a former Miami city commissioner and the church’s recently retired senior pastor. “Land is hard to come by, but churches and schools and other entities are in a position where they have built in properties.”
Dunn retired in December, but has worked toward developing the site since he joined the 23-year-old church in 2008. He first learned of churches developing their land into housing when he studied at Morehouse School of Religion in Atlanta. Many churches had long built housing in Atlanta. Dunn said they had “a holistic approach to ministry. Not only am I concerned about your soul, I am concerned that you have adequate affordable housing, a place to live.”
His son B.D., short for Brandon Dunn, now oversees Faith Community Baptist Church as the new senior pastor. B.D. said the revenue is needed. Besides renting out a space of the church to a youth educational program, the church relies on members’ donations. But membership has been down since the pandemic after many switched to virtual services.
Revenue from the sale of the townhomes will help the church stay afloat, spruce up the church building with fresh paint and grow charitable endeavors such as a food drive. Although B.D. stepped in as the new church leader, his father plans to stay on to see through the real estate development.
Buckley said she hopes to break ground on Faith Place Village by next summer. The project will then be ready by late 2026. Her firm will foot the construction bill and she plans to raise additional capital in coming months.
Traffic concerns
Still, despite the transparency and the sleepovers, Buckley’s project has its critics. Some in the area worry about additional traffic, said resident and Buckley’s host Helen Nierwinski.
“Developers right now have a bad reputation,” said Nierwinksi, a secretary for the Gratigny Neighborhood Association. “She’s trying to learn as much as she can about the community. She’s making an effort to build a project that the community will feel comfortable with as opposed to forcing the design on the community. This is what we want.”
Although traffic looms large, many are on board with the project, including retired teacher and long-time resident Joyce Tucker-Brown. She remembers when another developer years ago proposed building between 70 and 100 residences. She said this proposal is “something we feel we can absorb and the infrastructure could handle like traffic.”
As for her developer sleepovers, Buckley said she hopes to add more nights in coming weeks.
Tucker-Brown said she would gladly host Buckley. She said Buckley is the first developer in the area who has interacted with residents in this way.
“You see it’s someone really trying to get the neighborhood,” Tucker-Brown said. “We find out she’s human, just like we are.”
