https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/property/1418399-Tell-me-the-cons-of-living-next-to-a-church

https://www.city-data.com/forum/maryland/2604264-buying-home-right-church-thoughts-positives.html

Attend each one and see what you think then.

This is not a huge deal but you might want to check to see if the churches or temple are food pantries. I work for a food bank and many of our partners are faith organizations. That would be at most once a week of traffic and their hours of distribution should be listed on their website.

Disregard the comment about 'the houseless' (not a term; it's unhoused). They're not bad people and it's not wrong if they live in campers or tiny houses.

We live quite close to a church, school and nursing homes. One nursing home has a very deep lot and the back of their parking lot is against the back side of my lot. They are probably the most annoying as their ventilation equipment is noisy and their dumpster gets emptied about 5 am. The high school football field vehicle access gate is one house away but the school and its parking lots are down an alley way and around the corner. 

We very rarely see students on our block although sometimes the track team or PE classes run through the alleyway. The school has a deal with the city that the field lights have to be turned off by 10 pm and they are limited to twenty nights per year using the lights. The games can be a bit noisy with the announcer doing play by play and they ring a loud bell when the home team scores and at the end of winning games. Fortunately, they don't seem to have a marching band; unfortunately they do have a bagpipe corps! 

One positive is the extra green space behind the nursing homes and around the school is interesting for walking the dog. The neighborhood kids like the parking lots for pickup games of soccer and the younger ones have a safe bike riding area. Every winter the open space around the school and football field means the north wind whips across our driveway like crazy so open space can be negative too. 

High school kids don't have recess outside but living close to an elementary school means listening to excited voices, balls bouncing, whistles and shouts. It is surprising how far playground noise travels

My experience is different than what sheloveslayouts mentions. My last and current homes are in a small town that has some of the higher home prices in this area. One thing keeping the prices high is the walk-to location for excellent schools (public and private) as well as walking distance to churches, parks, and the small town stores and restaurants.

Your due diligence is great, and I would keep it up: visit the area during school drop off / pick up times, church/temple service times, and evenings. Park on the street you like and walk to retail and parks. You don't mention whether there are sidewalks in the neighborhood, but I consider those to be very important, especially if you have a dog.

The schools in my town haven't adversely affected home prices. I did a quick check on sale prices on Zillow, and while the prices will seem paltry to people in LA or NY, for a suburb of Chicago they reflect a fairly healthy home price and the sold prices reported for homes near the schools are higher than the median home price in this town.

@chicagoans thanks! there are sidewalks on the arterials but not on the neighborhood roads.

Parking lots are generally ugly, but you'll be able to see that yourself.

I lived near a Temple/school complex years ago. On parents' night or when there were other school events, it was impossible to find parking (my rental had on-street parking). Because people tended to walk, during services it wasn't much of a problem, although some Friday nights were a problem. I did think families walking to church (temple) in their Sunday (Saturday) best showed what a good neighborhood it was, although years after I moved out, there was a terror attack on the synagogue.

I lived in a very Jewish neighborhood and stores were closed on the Sabbath (although open on Sundays) and on holidays. The stores were often very annoying as their signs said things like "Closed for Sukkoth" without informing you when that was or when they'd be open.

I think it might have been easier to plan if I'd had a better sense of when the holidays were. This was before mobile phones. Maybe today you just add Jewish holidays to your calendar so you know when parking will be a challenge.

Being within walking distance of a school is a plus, but if it's a private school for a minority religion, the pool of people who want to be within walking distance of that school might be not that great.

@Sigrid do you know about how large the school enrollment was?

That sounds like a reasonable trade off to me. We do drop off at a school that sized and it's nevery busy, not like the 500 kid public elementary schools that cause a lot of street congestion and are pretty loud. I'd drive by during the day during recess to see how crazy it is - I know people that WFH that don't want to border on the playground for noise reasons. But the smaller shchool should make it way less hectic. The church services/events seems like they would be fine given the more than adequate parking.

School drop off and pick up car lines can be a crazy free for all with clueless parents not following the rules. I never hesitated to honk my horn at the parent that blocked everyone's way so that their precious buttercup teenager didn't have to walk a few more feet. Sometimes it felt like you were running the gauntlet! Car line memories in a district with no school buses!

My point, go to the lots you are considering a few different days, bring a lawn chair and watch what happens at pick up and drop off. Another thing to watch out for, now that Waze navigation app directs traffic right through residential neighborhoods in order to avoid traffic on main roads, so go to the lots at morning/afternoon rush hour too.

I read a post recently that cautioned against living near churches or schools because everyone leaves at the same time, and the traffic often prevented him from getting out of his driveway.

I would consider living a block or two from a school or place of worshop but definitely NOT on the same block. And I certainly would NEVER buy a house backing up to retail establishments.

@cpartist yes, the ones that back up to retail are less than ideal. But they are also extremely deep, about 600-800 feet (guessing, haven't looked it up in a while). So compared to a regular lot it's more like having a lot that backs up to two regular suburban lots worth of forest, and then the retail.

No it's not like backing up to two regular suburban lots of forest then retail. Out back are garbage, kids at night, etc. And who knows what's being thrown in the trash.

Three rules of buying real estate are to buy:

1. Location

2. Location

3. Location

What is the price difference between the lots backing onto the schools/houses of worship, the houses backing the retail and the houses backing neither of those?

I don't know - 600 feet of buffer is pretty darn good. It would depend on the retail of course.

Kids at night? I think we all understand we can have vastly different local environments.

Around me - kids are not allowed out at night. Not out in a "hanging out behind retail" kind of way. That would be trespassing I would think.

Now - garbage bin retrieval is fairly loud and often at strange hours.

I live near a church but it is almost 1/2 mile away. It is on the same small suburban-like road. Has a huge parking lot. Before Covid, the streets were lined with cars on Sunday AM and more so x-mas and Easter. Not near us but for the 1/8 mile or so around.

I think after Covid, enough people got out of the habit of going so I haven't seen as much of an issue but maybe I haven't been walking/driving that direction on Sunday AM recently. The lot is probably good for 90% so if just 10% still aren't going or out of the habit, then the street is fine.

I have to say, the bigger question is why are all these lots available? You have a couple of failing churches nearby - what happens to them? Do you care? There is a very nice downtown of a town nearby that is getting lots of development (and it is quite rich). People were threatening to sue to get deposits back on $1M townhomes because it became known that some were going to be low-income housing. I thought it was funny because this was 1-1.5 years ago when the builder would probably have been happy to give back deposits. And the people were so disgusted to live next to a teacher I guess. "low-income" is a relative term.

Side note - our last house was in a large lot suburban area. The people we sold the house to had a large bible study (40 cars?) on Sundays. The neighbors hated it but the new owners have since moved away. This was in an HOA where onstreet parking was discouraged (and banned as a regular overnight habit). So you just never know....

@David Cary These are definitely good questions, thanks. Everything is zoned low density residential, so if the churches did sell, it seems unlikely they would be converted to higher density housing, but that definitely isn't a given.

The lots aren't all available all at once. We see one or two pop up a year. We are planning for the long term when scoping out possible neighborhoods. Many of the lots are owned in pairs or triplets which suggests people bought them as investments. Most of the houses are old and inhabited by people in their 60s-80s.

I think it's primarily the zoning that makes them seem less desirable to developers, as you could fit 3-4 typical compact suburban houses on one lot. If you divide up the yellow area by the typical larger lot size, there would've been about 50 lots, but only 5-6 were split up into smaller ones to put up 18 or so houses around 3 cul de sacs. The rest are zoned for one dwelling each.

This also didn't happen any time recently--I don't know exactly when, but it would've happened in the 80s or early 90s. So this suggests that the city is not incredibly amenable to rezoning these lots.

There was a chance that a park and ride was going to be built somewhere in the commercial area on the crude map which is its southern border, but they decided to put it on the northern border of the commercial area instead because that was closer to the highway. The difference in distance is such that a lot of the developer tax and zoning incentives (e.g. reduced parking requirements) for putting up denser housing don't apply to this neighborhood.

To be frank, the city is rather anti-density and transit, although this is not why we were initially interested. We actually found the neighborhood after our favorite restaurant moved near there, away from our current city, because of rent increases.

And bluntly, I think the churches are failing due primarily due to demographic shifts as previously redlined areas downtown have now become gentrified. The local suburban population has become increasingly more diverse and non-Christian. It's possible that population shifts could also shift the city politics as well, who knows.

One of the churches sold off part of its lot to a couple that built a large house on it. I'm not sure if that's what would happen if they failed entirely. I'm not well-versed enough to know if the church lots seem attractive to developers.

The office and commercial spaces to the north aren't particularly special, all low rise offices, chain stores, strip malls, and car dealerships. It wraps around some light industrial e.g. grocery store warehouses, welding/fabrication shops, print/signmaking/engraving shops, car/appliance repair, etc.

The main high rise downtown area is a 20 minute bus ride away.

There wasn't a question in all that. Move on. You are waaay over thinking this. It's not the place for you. Location is the one thing that you can't change--but curiously enough it is one that can change on you. In our town we have what's called "Church Corner'. Three churches across the intersection, one empty lot. The biggest church is now a Charter School so the parking lot is quite busy with teenage drivers everyday. The zoning can be changed. High Density housing is popping up all over. Do not count on it. That empty lot is owned by the local pulic school and it's their dream to build a new campus and football field on that lot. Recent events make that seem highly unlikely but 10 years ago it seemed very likely. Remember you will OWN only your home. The rest could change. Any of those failing churches could fail and be sold for who knows what.

I live behind a public elementary school, 662 students. There is a 60 ft. wooded buffer between my back yard and the school property. The kids are out at recess for a two hour staggered span, so yes, there are little voices "chirping" during that time but I think of it as youthful energy surging through the universe. (Although there are terrified sounding screaming sometimes, I wonder what they are up to). Lots of soccer and basketballs wind up in the buffer zone, so that would be a pro if you needed one. The only real con is during end of day pickup. The car waiting lane wraps around the street in front of my house and some of the people are so rude, it's unbelievable. Many of them block our driveways as they wait and get quite argumentative if I'm trying to come into my driveway at that time. It's only for about 20 minutes a day, so I try to ignore it. Although I do worry about the children of the rude parents, especially the one who wouldn't let me in my driveway, wouldn't even pull up five feet for me to squeeze in. When I asked her to not block my driveway in the future, she said, "What choice do I have?" Duh.....how about, leave my driveway open?

I once lived down the street from a Catholic church. they had a large parking lot but on Friday evenings, it overfloweth and people parked on the street. They didn't block driveways as they were parked, not waiting in their cars, but they did stomp all over any flowers parked near the curb. Again, it's not all the time, just at peak times or special events.

I once lived about four blocks from a community college in a setting with neighborhoods all around it. That was the worst. Don't know if they didn't have enough parking or if they charged students to park there and folks were trying to save money, but people parked in front of the house a lot. It was only during the week and primarily daytime hours, so when I was at work the same hours, it didn't impact me, but when I worked from home, it was quite annoying as the street was narrow and people parked on both sides. Made it treacherous to navigate as young adults are not very aware of their surroundings and I was always concerned one would step out from between the cars and I'd hit them.

@chicagoans advice is the best, go to the location at various times and see how it is. If it makes you crazy as a visitor, it will really make you crazy as a resident.

Also, check the zoning of the properties. You indicated one had less than stellar attendance. They may sell out and move to a different property if the property value is increasing. Zoning can change of course, but make sure you know what could be with current zoning. If the property is zoned for only specific types of commercial that have impacts you can live with, that's good.

@tozmo1

all the churches are zoned for one dwelling each, but the church parcels each consist of 1-3 lots.

We lived kitty-corner from a church with a preschool and a drop-in and a nice-sized congregation, and the parking lot was directly across the street. I don’t recall issues with it. We could hear the car doors on Sunday mornings; if they had an 8:00 service, not many people went because it didn’t wake us up. Sometimes a wedding would have a bagpiper pipe them out of the church! That was actually kind of fun, and it lasted only one or two songs. We’d take the toddler out to watch and listen. There was also a church around the corner that shared our alley. A parking lot in the alley, though, sent cars out onto the main street behind the church, not past our house, so we were never really aware of the church except for the bells. Town was also around the corner. The biggest impact for us in that house was that there was a summer-long music festival a mile or two south of us. When Peter Paul and Mary, Tony Bennett, or the 1812 Overture were on the program, people would park on our street and in front of our house to take the shuttle down and back. Not too troublesome, except at about 10pm we’d hear a flurry of car doors closing for about 5 minutes when they all came back.

Depending on the type of temple school, there may be school on holidays when you sre not at work. Although I imagine that if that were the case, the neighborhood would be more heavily orthodox. And of course on religious holidays, there might be more cars at different hours. and some might have activities outdoors.

But, your hopes for your family member is an important factor. Eventually, when you move, such a location might be a good rental.

To be frank, the city is rather anti-density and transit, although this is not why we were initially interested.

When we moved to my city 13 years ago, they too were anti-density. And no high rise could be higher than 18 floors. NO MORE!

Different city council members in the pockets of developers now.

I had a friend who didn't buy a nice house located right by a church/school. Her objection was the NA/AA meetings held there, the smoking outside, butts, etc. I'm not advocating her position, but rather suggesting that a future buyer might have a similar issue.

My nephew had a nice 60s ranch on a 60 x 400 ft lot in a desirable Chicago suburb. Many neighboring homes were newly built McMansions but not all and the commercial district was a couple blocks away. He ended up selling to a single parent who was delighted to find affordable housing. Fortunately for him, most of the space was already fenced but his fencing bill was still expensive.

The issue with those deep lots is how can it be used. How many people really want to keep up that much lot? If you have a very avid gardener, perhaps the lot would be useful. Otherwise, you will be buying a very expensive mower to cut that yard or leave it wild. In most cases, you end up with the responsibility  to pay taxes and secure a buffer zone that has no practical value.

I live one block off of a "commercial" street which is mostly houses and the occasional apartment building, but also includes a couple gas stations, a convenience store, car repair shop, an elementary school and several churches. I can see two of the closest churches while looking through the block of houses across the street from me; and one of those has a food pantry and a performance theater on site. I can say at that distance they never cause any issue for me.

I'm not sure if I was that one block closer I would feel differently (although in my case I would then also have the busy street to face right out onto). I would chose being next to a church before I would chose to have my backyard back up to a business.

I lived on the same block as a temple. Every Friday night our driveway was blocked so we couldn’t get a car out. EVERY Friday night. Its been over 20 years so I forget the exact times, but I dont forget the annoyance and feeling trapped. I loved the house and yard but would not purchase a similarly located house again.

That seems as simple as some orange "cone heads". White painted rocks at the junction of driveway and street! Park here and get TOWED. A SIMPLE sign .......

Niece bought a house next to a small church, she bought 3 years ago.

One of the driveways to the parking lot goes around her property.

The church has now been sold. It is to be an event center. Weddings etc.

She’s hoping they will want her property for more parking. Not happy at all now.

Avoid the churches.