Yes in My Spare Room

In the summer of 2020, my wife and I, like many others, were finding our worlds shrinking as we quarantined at home. Then a call came out of the blue. Our old college friend needed a place to stay. Did we know of anywhere she could crash for a few months?

Serving as a foreign missions worker in a closed country, our friend faced a novel obstacle: the Covid pandemic had sealed the borders. There could be no return to her ministry location, indefinitely.

My wife, Liz, and I looked at each other. We had a spare room. Could we offer it to Hanna? The complexities were real. Our three-bedroom, two-bath house was decently sized, but not massive. Not only were we both working remotely from home, but Liz was also six months pregnant, and we were planning a home birth and had begun organizing our nursery.

Did we really want to bring a new person into our household at such a special and vulnerable time?

Hanna was a friend, but sometimes living in community creates friction. Would inviting her to stay in our place ruin our friendship?

And most of all, as middle-class Americans, we were used to quite a bit of privacy. Would we really want someone from outside our nuclear family sharing our space?

We decided to say yes. Hanna lived with us for six months, becoming the first of many long-term co-living residents:

• A week after Hanna left, two of our in-laws, their infant, and an elderly dog moved in for a few months.
• A week after they left, a college student moved in for half of a semester.
• That summer, someone who was only an acquaintance moved in for nearly a full year.
• Now, as I write this, a nursing professor is spending three nights a week in our spare room, working at a local university while his family stays in their hometown.

Each of these guests has added something to our household: a recipe, a kitchen tool, a phrase, a song. In return, each one has received something from us: a bedroom to sleep in, a family to talk to, a baby to bounce on a knee, a landing place in a tender and tumultuous time. 

Photo by Adobe Stock.

It wasn’t until I started publicly sharing about my experiences with this form of co-living that I realized just how uncommon this practice is nowadays. And that’s a shame, because it brings a host of benefits. It provides company for lonely and isolated individuals. It helps Christians to practice embodied love and hospitality for others. And last but not least: America is facing a generational housing shortage.

The Housing Crisis

It’s hard to scroll through the news or turn on the TV without someone exploring the skyrocketing costs of housing in America. This problem is a contributing factor to any number of others, from poverty and homelessness to entrenched segregation to suppression of marriage and fertility rates. Culprits abound, but most experts agree that one key reason for housing unaffordability is zoning regulations. In the 1880s, local zoning ordinances began to pop up in California. Their intent and effect was to keep Chinese immigrants from moving into predominantly white neighborhoods by prohibiting laundry and bathhouses in residential areas. The first citywide zoning code was passed in New York in 1916, whose stated intention was to prevent large buildings from occluding light and air to streets below. The proliferation of zoning laws since then is a frustrating tangle of valid health and safety requirements and a handy way for locals to veto new construction that they may not want for other reasons. Don’t want a new apartment building on your block because you’re scared of who might move in there? Force the developer to complete lengthy traffic and environmental impact studies. Don’t want a duplex in your community of single-family homes? Argue that your neighborhood has historic value and that a duplex would irrevocably change its character. (If necessary, even a parking lot can be called a “historic site.”)

The result has been dramatic. In his 2025 book Stuck:How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity, Yoni Appelbaum argues that America likely needs an additional 30 million units of housing to adequately meet current and future demand. That means that, above and beyond current building rates, we need twenty years’ worth of new construction – as soon as possible.

In theory, most people understand the need for additional housing units. But a lot of these same people, when asked if construction can happen in their community, would say, “Not in my back yard.” These “NIMBYs” often reflect entrenched interests of long-term residents. Their property values keep growing, while newcomers are forced to pay a premium or move to more distant locales.

Through zoning, lawsuits, and other tools of negation, NIMBYs can halt the natural growth of a town and freeze it in stasis. Like taxidermy, it might even look quite alive. But it will be missing something vital.

Yes in My Back Yard

In response to NIMBYism and skyrocketing housing costs, another housing movement has taken shape (again, first originating in California and rapidly spreading): Yes in My Back Yard. Self-described YIMBYs argue for lifting of zoning restrictions to legalize new housing construction.

Like their counterpart NIMBYs, YIMBYs can be found across the political spectrum. Libertarian YIMBYs argue the government has no business telling a property owner what type of house she should be allowed to build on her own land. Progressive YIMBYs suggest that the inequity of the wealth gap is in large part driven by real estate: allowing more homes to be built for marginalized folks could do more to erase generational poverty than any government handout. Some YIMBYs have become cheerleaders of the nascent “Abundance” movement, which argues that America just needs more of everything: more housing, more mass transit, more clean energy. 

YIMBYism is not without its critics. Some old-school environmentalists are skeptical that simply building more is ever the right response. Some conservatives are fearful of the concept of “urbanism,” questioning the motives of progressives who welcome immigrants and increase urban density. Socialists worry that corporate conglomerates will take over any new construction, exacerbating the wealth gap without helping the poor.

I, too, question some tenets of YIMBYism. Modern Americans own bigger homes than ever, with fewer people in them than historically used to be the case. Appelbaum writes in Stuck that the average 1900s New York City tenement had just 102 square feet of housing space per resident. In contrast, new houses built in 2010s America offered 924 square feet per person. Meanwhile, demographic trends predict that the overall American population will likely start shrinking within the next few decades, even accounting for immigration.

High housing costs are clearly an issue in America. But building new housing units is only part of the answer. When so many Americans already have more space than they need, and they’re decreasingly likely to fill it with a brood of kids, couldn’t some of this extra space be put to use? As YIMBY author Diana Lind writes in her 2020 book Brave New Home, “The irony of the American housing crisis is that much of American housing is actually under-occupied. According to studies, there are somewhere between forty and sixty-five million spare bedrooms in existing housing stock.”

Meanwhile, it’s hard to find a forward-looking yet distinctly Christian perspective in the conversation about housing scarcity. Many conservative Christians seem wary of change and thus default to a generic NIMBYism. On the YIMBY side are a handful of writers, such as Addison Del Mastro, who writes in favor of urbanism from a Catholic perspective. (Del Mastro argues that healthy, well-managed towns and cities do more to help humans flourish than endless suburban sprawl.) But in general, most YIMBYs don’t write from a Christian perspective, typically adopting a more technocratic tone (for examples, see the work of YIMBY sympathizers Matthew Yglesias, Ezra Klein, Jerusalem Demsas, and Derek Thompson).

What would a truly Christian perspective on America’s housing shortage look like? There’s no one panacea for this complex problem. But I have some ideas.

Hospitality and Co-Living

First, unlike the NIMBYs, a Christian perspective on housing would be heavy on hospitality. The biblical Greek word for hospitality is philoxenia (love of stranger). Yet most NIMBYs practice the more selfish xenophobia (fear of strangers). Showing friendly love toward strangers and outsiders isn’t just a requirement for Christian elders and deacons. It’s a command given to all followers of Christ. The author of Hebrews writes: “Do not forget to show hospitality to strangers, for by so doing some people have shown hospitality to angels without knowing it” (Heb. 13:2).

Hospitality, at minimum, must mean being open to new residents moving into our communities. Here the YIMBYs are on to something: it is arguably un-American, and more importantly, un-Christian, to want to pull up the ladder of housing affordability right after we ourselves have climbed it. But I think hospitality must mean more than simply not opposing new construction. Christians are called to a higher bar: some of us might be invited to open our own literal back yards and homes to those in need of affordable housing. 

I haven’t always understood this. Growing up, I imagined hospitality to mostly mean hosting someone for a meal. Distant relatives visiting town? Welcome them to your house for a couple hours, give them a drink and snacks, then send them on their way – that’s more than enough hospitality for one day. Such hospitality, typical in middle-class America, would seem meager indeed to many non-Western cultures around the world, and even more so in ancient times.

In fact, there are countless examples of biblical characters who exemplify generous hospitality. The Shunammite woman in 2 Kings 4:8–10 suggests to her husband that they construct a small room on the roof of their house for the prophet Elisha, all the way down to the interior decoration: “Let’s put in it a bed and a table, a chair and a lamp for him. Then he can stay there whenever he comes to us.” Similarly, Lydia in Acts 16:14 persuades Paul, Luke, and their fellow travelers to come and stay with her in her house.

For my wife and me, our foray into overnight hosting first started when we rented our spare rooms on Airbnb for guests (rarely longer than a night or two). We had a lot of fun, though not without its challenges. There was the Australian guest who looked at us funny when I told him we used reusable cloth napkins during our meals: apparently in Australia “napkin” means something quite different! And there are of course safety concerns in any co-living situation: Liz and I screened our guests beforehand and made sure we abided by common-sense safety measures like putting away valuables and changing our lockbox code frequently. 

Along with these challenges, however, were some real joys. We made new friends from around the country and around the world. One Chinese woman stayed with us for a week, cooking homemade meals in our kitchen; less than two years later, her daughter would pray to receive Jesus in that very same kitchen.

We eventually left the Airbnb platform when it became clear the overall push of the website was toward “whole unit rentals” instead of shared co-living situations. But those experiences gave us a chance to practice our hospitality, so that when Hanna called us in the summer of 2020, we were better prepared to respond.

Unlike our paying guests, all of our long-term guests have stayed for more than a month (though less than a year). We seemed to be meeting a real need. If people want to stay somewhere for a week, they can stay in a hotel. A year or more, they can lease an apartment. But what about those people who are in transition and need a place for an uncertain number of months? College students, couples who are separating, travel nurses, refugee families, and more need spaces like this. Services such as Airbnb can sometimes find a good fit, but those options are often too expensive and don’t provide the support of a community. These people could benefit from in-person support, encouragement, and care. Could more Christians say, “Yes, in my spare room?”

Christian hospitality does not demand foolish risk. It is not wise to invite an unknown man sleeping on the street corner into your house if you have children. Common-sense boundaries (doors that lock, caution around children) and clear expectations (about who’s cleaning, cooking, and paying bills) can make the experience better for everyone. In our case, we’ve only considered boarders who are close friends or acquaintances whom we’ve had the chance to vet ahead of time.

I think there’s a real opportunity here for more people to experiment with co-living. Many of us have a spare room that is rarely used, except for storage. I believe if more Christians tried out “yes in my spare room,” many of them would realize they quite enjoy it, homeowner and guest alike.

“Co-living is such a great way to become more self-aware and thoughtful of others,” one of our previous houseguests, Hannah Marie, wrote in response to a survey. “You don’t realize how much you’re learning from other people when you’re just doing life together that way, and it’s incredibly valuable. It also provides a lot of the community/friendship needs that so many of us desire!”

Hospitality Houses

Another creative vision of a Christian approach toward housing can be found in Asheville, North Carolina. Alexander Sosler is an assisting priest at Redeemer Anglican Church, but his passion goes far beyond his congregation. Through offering childcare in the locality, the church learned that in Asheville women with young children are often required to leave local homeless shelters after one year, even when they are not quite ready to begin renting a place on their own at full price. They need affordable housing, and more than that, they need a support network to help them transition into the broader community, beyond the more formal care that case workers provide.

Dr. Wesley Furlong, who volunteers in hospitality and compassionate ministries at the church, proposed “Hospitality Houses,” small homes built in literal back yards for single mothers who are transitioning out of homeless shelters. These moms would be charged below-market rent, while being coached and encouraged by both the homeowners in the main house and a support team from the church.

Officially known as Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs), but more informally known as “backyard cottages” or “granny flats,” homes like the ones Furlong and Sosler are building have full bathrooms, kitchens, and bedrooms in a tiny footprint (450 square feet). Furlong told me that their first Hospitality House, built in his own back yard, was the first new ADU to receive legal permission and a low-interest loan in Asheville.

It wasn’t an easy process.

Furlong chose to use old-fashioned timber-frame construction, but emphasizing quality (and utilizing unpaid volunteers) meant the house took one year to build instead of three months. Worse, a nearby group of NIMBY neighbors filed a lawsuit to halt construction, misrepresenting their efforts as an illegal, four-unit drug rehab center. Furlong acknowledges these challenges, but insists the results were worth it:

It’s been interesting to see stages of healing and growth. The conversations that we have now with the tenant at six months are so different than the conversations at one and two months. … In that first month, she had never thought about the future. Everything was just survival. And there were no dreams. But now she’s really dreaming and has great hopes. She has aspirations.

Furlong and Sosler plan to build the next three Hospitality Houses in nearby Sylvia, North Carolina, but are always dreaming about other options, including co-living or even adapting unfinished spaces. Furlong told me of a sermon by Saint John Chrysostom where he says, “You have room for your chariot, but not for Christ.” In that same spirit, he wonders about underused garages that could be converted into an in-law suite or ADU (if zoning allows).

Yes in God’s Back Yard

Redeemer Anglican Church is not unique; many churches have flung themselves into the housing conversation. Some have done so under the banner of yet another acronym: “Yes in God’s Back Yard” (YIGBY). These YIGBY advocates examined their church properties (excess land, parking lots, and underutilized buildings) and lobbied for the right to build affordable housing units on their property.

In California, YIGBY advocates successfully pushed for the passage of SB4, the Affordable Housing on Faith and Higher Education Lands Act of 2023. Passed in late 2023, this law allows religious institutions and independent nonprofit colleges that meet the bill’s criteria to build affordable multifamily housing on eligible land through a use-by-right process that replaces the usual discretionary rezoning path. The success of YIGBY has inspired efforts in numerous other states, including Washington and Maryland. 

I spoke to one YIGBY advocate in Denver, Colorado. Jessica Dominguez, a former public school teacher who got tired of seeing her students experience homelessness, is now the director of Abundant Ground. She and her husband, Joseph, along with four hundred other faith leaders, were advocates for HB 25-1169, a state bill that would have rezoned land owned by houses of worship. Even though the bill failed in the Colorado Senate earlier this year, the Dominguezes are unfazed and see their work as bigger than a single bill.

In a slight difference from YIMBY’s priority of building as fast as possible, two key themes of YIGBY, Joseph explained, are “anti-displacement” – creating affordable housing so long-term residents can afford to stay in their communities – and “stewardship” – the idea that churches should treat the land they own as a gift God has entrusted to them for God’s people and the greater good of the community. Through webinars, trainings, coaching, and discipleship, Jessica and Joseph are helping churches in Denver, Kansas City, and other cities to discern if God is inviting them to develop their properties for affordable housing.

Whether on a church’s property, in an empty back yard, or in a spare room, there are ways that Christians can choose to creatively make space for people who need housing.

Challenges exist. Not everyone has a spare back yard or a spare room. Yet there’s a place for creativity. My wife and I hired a contractor to renovate our unfinished attic. It now serves as my primary workspace. It doubles as a kid’s playroom and as an additional spare room or “Christ’s Room” (just watch your head going down the stairs). We made the decision to have our young children share a bedroom in order to free up our spare room for whatever long-term guest God might send our way. We even swapped our living room couch for a sleeper sofa just in case all other beds get filled.

I want to acknowledge that not every believer can be part of the solution for the housing crisis, nor should they. God may be calling you to other steps of faithfulness. But what I can say, from my own experience, is that my family has gained so much more than we lost when we opened up our spare rooms.

The American vision of success is clear: a cavernous, private home with a massive yard. For churches, maybe it’s a sprawling, massive complex built on a big, empty hill.

These things aren’t necessarily bad. But Jesus invites us into something better.