Churches used to be Anchor Building in a or any community along too with similar buildings and different faiths. In Philly, many of these older churches or Fraternal Meeting Hall structures were the center of a lot of people's everyday living. They were literally built on pennies, nickels and dimes of the working poor and now in ancient age they many times, if not torn down, are the centerpiece of some condo conversion, a setting for dozens of expensive postage stamp size studios and small one bedroom apartments in an up and coming reborn neighborhood revival. A lot of kids raised in the burbs discover the centuries old magic of people living and functioning in cities.
If land starts out as taxable and then is bought and improved by a religion for a house of worship, it then slips in entitlement as "tax-free" as in sheltered from the local taxes, it only makes sense that one day when these entitled properties slip back into real world taxation by sale from a religious group to a developer, that instead of the usual capital gains which probably does not exist in such tax filings, that if not a tax on capital gains, the community, the city, and or the state, should have some say as this property transitions back to pure capitalist function, the transitions of entitlement from tax-free to taxable should in fact be an say if the community wants 40 condos shoved up the butt of a beautiful old Victorian church building. That running away from the scene and selling this church so that two monks can now go wild with whores, drugs, and limousines, more say and or control as a condition of entitlement change of the property should be allotted and in the hands of the community.
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