Joel EngelhardtCrossroads Baptist Church would be demolished to make way for 318 apartments on eight acres owned by a Baptist association.
The church at the crossroads of 45th Street and Haverhill Road for more than 50 years would be torn down and replaced by 318 apartments in three buildings six stories tall, a move that has left worshippers concerned for their future.
But the congregants of Crossroads Baptist Church no longer control the land their 350-seat church rests on. Unable to pay the mortgage, Crossroads sold the property to the Palm Lake Baptist Association for $38,191 in 1990.
Under an agreement signed about a year ago, Palm Lake would help the church under Pastor Leonard Grant for five years with an undisclosed sum to continue preaching in the neighborhood of mostly low-income Black and Caribbean families.
Palm Lake made a deal in July to sell the 8-acre property to Kolter Group, which is proposing the apartment complex and asking that the property be annexed into West Palm Beach. The county is not objecting to the annexation, which would bring the church into West Palm Beach city limits.
The first public hearing on the proposal is scheduled for May 19 before the city’s Planning Board. It ultimately must go before the West Palm Beach City Commission.
The deal illustrates the reach of Palm Beach County’s housing boom, which isn’t confined to waterfront high-rises but extends to forlorn pockets where builders struggle to find available land. It also promises a financial windfall for a local Baptist association at the expense of a single congregation.
The church sits on the corner, occupying no more than two acres of the site at the edge of the Gramercy Park neighborhood. The rest of the site is vacant.
Another long-vacant corner a few blocks east, at Military Trail and 45th Street, is undergoing construction to add a Wawa gas station-convenience store.
‘Just like a death in the family’
Crossroads’ pastor, Grant, said he urged the association to sell six acres but leave the church with two.
“I’ve told them, we don’t want to move. You can take all of that, we don’t want it. Just give us this little piece right here,” he said pointing to the church buildings where he holds services on Sunday and provides food to congregants and neighbors. “Our defense is, we are doing church work. When somebody is sick, we show up. We feed people. As small as we are, we are doing good work.”
The church has about 85 members now but has gone through periods with far more and far fewer. Grant brought in his Philadelphia Baptist Church, which had been meeting in a local high school, and merged it with Crossroads in 2019.
Finding a new location doesn’t make sense to Beulah Blane, a 92-year-old church regular.
“It would be just like a death in the family,” she said.
Countered Steve Thomas, president of the Palm Lake association and pastor at First Baptist Delray, the cost of maintaining the two church buildings, one built in 1964, the other 1974, is too great. He said the buildings needed expensive repairs, including roofs.
“I know this is emotional, but we don’t have the money to fix the property,” he said. “We’ve done our best to be faithful to them” over 35 years.
Association must extinguish deed restriction
The association counts more than 40 Baptist churches among its members, including Family Church, the former First Baptist Church of West Palm Beach, which itself has more than 20 locations.
“Our goal was to do the most we could for the kingdom,” Thomas said. “We want to see churches start and be planted and grow and develop.”
Crossroads bought the property in 1974 from Northwood Baptist Church, which later evolved into Village Baptist Church and now comes under the umbrella of Family Church. Crossroads took out an $85,000 mortgage in 1975.
The 1974 deed restricted the land to use as a church “cooperating in name and practice with the Southern Baptist Convention.” If that were to end, the property would revert to Northwood Baptist, the deed said.
The clause is not a problem, said Kevin Mahoney, a pastor at Family Church Gardens and a certified public accountant. Since Family Church is the successor to Northwood Baptist, it has the power to extinguish the deed restriction, which it will do without compensation, Mahoney said.
The money will go to Palm Lake, primarily for church repairs and to start new churches, he said. The amount Kolter is going to pay for the site has not been disclosed. Typically, the deal closes and the amount becomes public after the zoning is granted.
Kolter is seeking an increase in density on the site in exchange for building 22 workforce housing units. Five would be for renters earning 80% of the area median income, 10 would go to renters at 100% of AMI and seven to those earning 120% of AMI.
Overall, the property would have 29 studio units, 150 one-bedroom units, 127 two-bedroom and 12 three-bedroom.
