Common Wealth Development Purchases Arbor Covenant Church: Investing in the Future
Above: Members of Common Wealth Development and Arbor Covenant Church at the celebration of the purchase at Arbor Covenant Church.
Below: Former Alder Sheri Carter speaks at the event.
By Jonathan Gramling
While the Arbor Hills area is primarily a solid middle-class neighborhood, it also has working-class and aging housing on its fringes. And as a solidly residential area, it also has a dearth of public spaces beyond its parks. There is no commercial district per se and little — if any — governmental infrastructure.
For several decades, Arbor Covenant Church has acted as a quasi-community center.
“The community space that we had in Arbor Hills was Arbor Covenant Church,” former Alder Sheri Carter said. “Pastor Morris way back in the early 2000s decided to allow the Arbor Hills Neighborhood Association to have their meetings there. And from that, we talked about having community dinners and other things and he expanded. That one has been a lifesaver for us.”
Arbor Covenant Church is an aging church in terms of its members and looking into the future, the congregation someday will be too small to support the church building economically. And so a suitor to purchase the building was looked for. That suitor was Common Wealth Development.
“I introduced Justice Castañeda to Pastor Morris,” Carter said. “And the first thing I said was it was vital that we continue to have a community space in Arbor Covenant Church and the development. At that time, they were only going to develop the vacant lot. That is what I was talking about. And then it expanded to include the church because the church has merged, so to speak. And so once I found out their development was going to include the church, then I had to step it up and say, ‘Okay, before we wanted it available. Now it has to be available because it is part of a different development.”
Common Wealth has had an interest in the area for a while. And like everything else it does, Common Wealth takes the long-range approach to community development.
“We know definitely from the Marquette neighborhood but also from the Meadowood neighborhood that these things take decades,” Castañeda said. “Most times it involves a dialogue with the people in the neighborhood to really get a feel for the best way to work in solidarity with the things that are already happening. And so when I first got to Madison one of the things that I started doing was just taking a look at your basic neighborhood indicators your neighborhood demographics and things like that. I looked at areas where there could be an opportunity to support the work of a number of organizations by stabilizing housing. And of those neighborhoods the Aldo Leopold neighborhood was one that definitely had an opportunity there.”
The slow march to development began back in 2018. By taking the slow approach, Common Wealth begins to understand the neighborhood dynamics and the people and organizations. And then it is also perceived more like a neighborhood resource rather than an outside development force that has the potential to disrupt community life.
“I wanted to get to know the folks,” Castañeda said about the Arbor Hills area. “That was happening already. But then you had two things. One was Sheri Carter who had been in contact and conversation with the congregation. And she knew that they were exploring options to basically stabilize and sustain the future of the campus. It’s hard to think about these things without thinking about them as part and parcel. But there is so much happening at that campus including the congregation but also everything we talked about at the event. Sheri had been working with the neighborhood and it is my understanding is they were exploring opportunities of different avenues to approach low to moderate income housing for seniors. I’m on the Destination District Taskforce with Sheri. Just through the work over the last six years I’ve been in various spaces with her and she has pulled me aside a few times and said ‘What do you know about low-moderate senior housing?’ I started slowly working with her. We have another connection through work with some folks from the congregation. We learned more about what they were trying to do. And those two conversations merged. That’s how it started. It started and just evolved.”
And from there, more conversations ensued.
“A lot of the work that is going on in our neighborhoods is prescient,” Castañeda said. “It is right now. We need it right now. But also I still think Common Wealth takes an approach that it is about relationships. And I know that means things take a lot longer than a community wants. You start feeling like we have to hurry up but the necessary conversations need to happen in order to make it the right work. We started working with the NRTs and some of the neighborhood organizations and some of the people who have been doing work in the neighborhood at the end of 2018 into 2019. And a lot of that was led by Stephanie Bradley Wilson. She wanted to get a sense of what is going on there and the best way we could work. Something that I think is really important is that the work that we did in Meadowood actually didn’t start with housing. It started with neighborhood conversations and then doing a lot of our employment work. And that actually came before the housing piece.”
One of the cornerstones of the community is Arbor Covenant Church on McDivitt Road. And it was going through its own evolution.
“We started talking with the congregation about the future,” Castañeda said. “They were interested in making sure that the campus stayed secure in some form or fashion as they got older. They wanted to make sure that the spirit of all of the work that they have put in not just to the physical building but also into the support of the neighborhood and the support of the city as it aligned with their faith. They wanted to ensure that work was honored in perpetuity even if even if it meant that it was going to outlive the actual members of the church. That’s been the conversation.”
Arbor Covenant Church sits on our acres of land that is adjacent to the Cannonball Run bike path and Aldo Leopold Park. With its easy access to the Beltline on Todd Drive, it could seem like a prime place for urban development. But with Common Wealth’s approach and the congregation’s desires, what’s going on at Arbor Covenant is what is most important.
“There is a lot of really cool stuff going on out of the church or with the church,” Castañeda said. “There is the refugee resettlement work that has been going on there. When you think about resources and infrastructure and the amount that they are actually doing is nothing short of phenomenal. And I would say that with our migrant, immigrant and refugee populations, there isn’t enough housing for anyone. It can be difficult when you have barriers and language barriers and the way that people may perceive your citizenship. The church is still going to be there. We’re going to support them for as long they want to operate. The church is there. It’s going to be there. It’s not going anywhere. And we are going to support them. By themselves, from their own work, the congregation has made that church a center of activities. They’ve created a multipurpose space there. The daycare is not connected directly to the church. But it has been operating out of the church building for over 30 years. There is stuff like that, which the church has been doing already. You just see amazing people who are doing really amazing work. And we are going to come in and support them in any way that they want or are asking for.”
Will some redevelopment work happen? More than likely yes. But that is 5-10 years down the road. In the meantime, Common Wealth will keep on listening.
“We really want to partner with the folks who are doing that work,” Castañeda observed. “We won’t see anything in terms of the campus, changes in terms of what we have planned close to 10 years. I think a lot of what we are doing is looking at the neighborhood and thinking about how we can think about the church and campus area as a center to reinforce and the support the thinking of that campus as a center of that neighborhood more so as thinking about it as a focus for redevelopment.”
Common Wealth is on the slow road to development, a method that makes people a part of the development and not an object of removal. It’s the humane way