St. Paul AME broke ground Thursday on St. Paul Terrace, a seven-story, 50-unit affordable building rising on the church's old annex and parking lot at 2024 Ashby Ave. — one of two South Berkeley church-land projects testing the YIGBY model.

At 2024 Ashby Ave., the thing that came down first was a parking lot. In its place, and in place of the annex building that stood beside St. Paul African Methodist Episcopal Church of Berkeley, a seven-story frame is going up — 50 apartments the church will still own when everyone at Thursday's groundbreaking is gone. "This is gonna last for years," one speaker said of the project, per Berkeleyside, which covered the ceremony. "At least 100 years, if not more than that."

The building is called St. Paul Terrace, and the numbers under it are specific. Fifty units, studios to three-bedrooms, for individuals and families earning no more than 60% of Berkeley's area median income — a figure that sits just over $100,000 for a single person. Thirteen of the units are set aside for seniors who are homeless or at risk of it. The estimated completion date is April 2028, a project representative, Darrylyn Swift, told Berkeleyside. The budget totals $69 million; more than $12 million of it comes from Measure O, the 2018 voter-approved bond meant to raise $135 million for affordable housing across the city.

What makes the corner worth watching isn't the unit count — it's who owns the ground. St. Paul AME kept its land and, in 2022, partnered with the Community Housing Development Corporation, a Black-led nonprofit developer based in Richmond, to build on it. That arrangement has a name now: YIGBY, for "Yes In God's Backyard," the movement to put housing on land that congregations already hold. St. Paul is one of two historically Black churches in South Berkeley approved to do it. The other, Ephesian Church of God in Christ on Alcatraz Avenue, plans a 79-unit building for low- and very-low-income seniors. A third, the century-old McGee Avenue Baptist Church, worked with the Bay Area Community Land Trust to turn a dilapidated building on Stuart Street into eight units that opened in 2022 — the first project funded under Berkeley's Small Sites Program.

The reason the addresses cluster in South Berkeley is not incidental. Berkeley's Black population fell by two-thirds between 1970 and 2020, according to Census data, as housing costs climbed and residents were pushed out. The city has since written that history into its allocation rules: descendants of people who lost homes to BART construction, lived in redlined neighborhoods, or went through foreclosure move first in line for units like these.

"This project is especially needed because it's in South Berkeley, and the community has a long history of redlining, divestment, displacement," Briana Brown, who directs community engagement for Alameda County Supervisor Nikki Fortunato Bas, said Thursday, per Berkeleyside. "Affordable housing like this helps to ensure the long-time residents can remain in the neighborhood they helped build."

Larry Taylor, vice president of CHDC's board, put the same idea in the past tense. South Berkeley was once "the busy epicenter of our city's Black life, culture and commerce," he said — "a neighborhood where people knew each other by name." Over recent years, he added, "that beautiful picture has changed dramatically due to the devastating loss of affordable housing."

Among those on hand Thursday: CHDC executive director Donald Gilmore, Mayor Adena Ishii's policy chief Julie Sinai, former mayor and state senator Jesse Arreguín, and South Berkeley Councilmember Ben Bartlett. What someone walking the block will see between now and April 2028 is scaffolding where the lot used to be — and, if the model holds, a landlord that isn't going anywhere.