The South Berkeley Community Church at 1802 Fairview St. owes $160,000 in back taxes and fees after losing its tax-exempt status due to lapsed paperwork. Credit: Ximena Natera, Berkeleyside/CatchLight LocalLarez Davenport can’t help getting emotional when she talks about South Berkeley Community Church. After all, the congregants paid for her to go to college. “How many people can say they went to school on the dime of their church?” she asked.
Beyond that, Davenport noted, it made history: “We were one of the first integrated churches in the state, maybe even the country.”
Established in 1943, as many Black residents were moving to the Lorin District and other non-segregated flatland neighborhoods, South Berkeley Community Church (SBCC) was, as one early church historian wrote, a “daring new venture in human relations and interracial understanding.”
It adopted a co-leadership model, with a pair of white and Black pastors at the helm. Founding co-pastor Roy C. Nichols became the first Black member of Berkeley’s school board and was instrumental in desegregating the city’s schools. W.E.B. DuBois lectured there in 1946. And parishioners included Berkeley councilmembers Maudelle Shirek, often called the godmother of East Bay progressive politics, and Max Anderson, who cofounded the advocacy group Friends of Adeline.
Over the decades, the church was tested — at one point splintering on racial lines — but through the years, it has continuously endeavored to serve the neighborhood. There were soirees and art classes, free HIV testing and marches for peace. In 1978, the church established a long-running hunger program that, at its peak, served meals to hundreds.
Today, however, the 80-year-old church at 1802 Fairview St. — added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2007 — is in danger of shuttering. Graffiti marks its entrance doors, and attendance is sparse. It has not had a full-time pastor in over a decade. The church’s denomination, the United Church of Christ, cut ties in 2018 due to infrequent services. And only 10 or so regular congregants remain at a church that once served over 100.
The final death knell for the church may come from the tax collector.
After years of falling behind on paperwork, the church lost its tax-exempt status in 2017. It now owes back taxes and fees totaling over $160,000. If unaddressed, Alameda County could auction off the church’s building next year.
“I know that we hadn’t been staying up to date,” said Larez Davenport, the church’s treasurer, who noted that one difficulty she’s faced in regaining tax-exempt status is that there aren’t enough parishioners to ratify a crucial document.
But she’s hoping for a miracle.
Larez Davenport, SBCC’s treasurer, during a sweltering October afternoon inside the church. Davenport is one of around 10 remaining regular churchgoers. Credit: Ximena Natera, Berkeleyside/CatchLight LocalIn recent months, she initiated a membership drive to bump up the size of SBCC’s congregation and has contacted Friends of Adeline and Councilmember Ben Bartlett for support. She plans to start a GoFundMe to pay for the property taxes, if it comes to it.
In many ways, SBCC embodies the challenges felt by congregations throughout the Bay Area. As demographics shift and churchgoing declines, the task of preserving small historic churches often falls to a handful of unpaid volunteers. While many longstanding East Bay churches continue to thrive and branch out, others are selling or foreclosing, their buildings repurposed as condos, homes and other community spaces.
Davenport said she is doing the “grunt work” of keeping her church a church. It’s a lot for one person to shoulder, but she’s hopeful. “We are trying to push through and let [Berkeley] know: We’re here, and we’re for the people.”
Interracial cooperation and community service
A photo of a diverse group of congregants posing outside The South Berkeley Community Church is one of the many historical pictures displayed at the church. Credit: Ximena Natera, Berkeleyside/CatchLight LocalConstructed in 1912, the Mission/Spanish Revival-style building on Fairview Street was initially built for a different congregation: Park Congregational Church.
At the time, South Berkeley was primarily occupied by white and Japanese American families. Over the next 30 years, however, the neighborhood changed dramatically. Thousands of Black Americans relocated to the Bay Area, fleeing discrimination and seeking greater opportunity during World War II. At the same time, many Japanese Americans were forced from their homes and imprisoned in camps.
By the 1940s, nearly a third of the Lorin District was Black, and white residents were leaving in droves, some headed to the hills, where redlining and other racist housing practices excluded African Americans and other minorities. In early 1943, Park Congregational, its membership shrinking, disbanded. Within months, Lorin residents partnered with the Congregational denomination to establish a new, intentionally integrated church in the building.
On July 9, the first members of South Berkeley Community Church finalized a covenant that read, “We welcome to our fellowship all persons, without regard to race, class, nation, or creed.” The church opened its doors a year before San Francisco’s Church for the Fellowship of All People, often credited as the first integrated church in the nation.
The church’s leaders frequently went on to have a broader impact. Buell Gallagher —a prolific critic of America’s “racial caste system” who co-pastored from 1946 to 1949 — eventually became the first chancellor of the California State University system. DuBois spoke at the church at his invitation.
The church’s ideal of interracial cooperation did not always pan out. In 1956, co-pastor Hazaiah Williams accused white parishioners, including co-pastor Fred Stripp, of eavesdropping and racism. Williams soon left the church, taking 30 to 40 Black members with him and creating the Church for Today in North Berkeley.
According to some longtime members, the congregation remained multiracial well into the 1990s. But in recent years, SBCC’s membership has been almost entirely Black.
The church’s legacy has consistently been that of a community hub. South Berkeley residents have attended the church for everything from crab cooks to public speaking courses.
The arts were always core to the church’s identity, too. In the years before the Shotgun Players secured their current home at the Ashby Playhouse, early productions took place at SBCC.
Beginning in 1978, the church leaders set out to meet a specific, urgent need: youth hunger. Edward Melfort, then pastor at SBCC, led a team of student volunteers cooking hot meals for 600 local school kids. The church had grown so committed to social programs, Melfort told the North East Bay Independent and Gazette, that SBCC obtained a hard-to-get welfare tax exemption, allowing them to receive government funding for their programs. The shift demonstrated that “we are not concerned just for ourselves,” he told the paper.
In time, SBCC’s hunger program evolved to serve the wider South Berkeley community. An industrial kitchen was installed next to the sanctuary to meet the growing need.
Through outreach programs like these, Larez Davenport, her sister Deonna Sayles, and then their mother, Bertha Brown, began attending the church in 1989. Davenport is “forever indebted to the church for offering her “a safe haven” and paying to send her to Xavier University of Louisiana and her sister to Portland State University.
It is a core reason that she is fighting to preserve SBCC, she said.
“For me, this is my give back to the community. If that means that I need to go down with the sinking ship, then I will do so.”
Falling on rough times
With SBCC losing members, keeping the historic building dust-free and in tip-top form has been almost impossible for the small group of volunteers caring for it. Credit: Ximena Natera, Berkeleyside/CatchLight LocalSmall Protestant churches like SBCC were already struggling mightily before the pandemic. According to a 2021 study, an estimated 3,850 to 7,700 churches shuttered annually between 2010 and 2020. In 2016, the greater Bay Area topped the Barna Group’s list of least- churchgoing areas in America.
During that decade, SBCC saw membership decline and finances suffer and sought out ways to stay afloat. For years, they shared their space with the Berkeley Creative Wellness Center, an arts-focused mental health center. Inferno Theatre, the South Berkeley-based company, regularly used the church for its productions. And the city pitched in funding for SBCC’s youth and hunger programs.
But the church continued to face challenges. Their most recent full-time pastor, Kenneth Milton, left in 2013 and has never been replaced. According to a representative of the Rev. Davena Jones, the Conference Minister overseeing the local chapter of United Church of Christ, the denomination cut ties with SBCC in 2018 because its services were infrequent, and the building was primarily rented out to other organizations. “They did not have a church functioning at all,” the representative said.
When the pandemic hit, SBCC never quite recovered. In-person services eventually resumed, but the youth program largely has not. And while Inferno Theatre still rehearses at the church and director Giulio Perrone has an office there, the company has not held a show there in years.
The hunger program persisted through the pandemic, but it is now mainly overseen by another religious organization: Mother’s Kitchen, the outreach arm of the MA (Mata Amritanandamayi) Center in San Ramon. One Mother’s Kitchen volunteer said that, in terms of using the church, “It’s primarily us.”
A battle with the tax collector
Larez Davenport browses through an old photo album with the faces of some reknowned former congregants like Berkeley councilmembers Maudelle Shire and Max Anderson. Credit: Ximena Natera, Berkeleyside/CatchLight LocalDuring all this, the church had fallen far behind on paperwork. In California, nonprofits must file tax exemption claims annually with the Board of Equalization. The church missed a few years. As a result, it lost tax-exempt status in 2017 and has racked up mounting property taxes and fees ever since.
While obtaining a standard church exemption is usually fairly simple, it’s harder without a pastor or a congregation. Alameda County assessor Phong La explained that a welfare exemption is less straightforward, requiring more complicated paperwork.
For Davenport, shouldering the church’s legacy feels like a massive, ever-growing burden. A mother of two and a full-time accountant in San Francisco, Davenport said other church board members weren’t well disposed to help.
But she said she’s giving it her best shot.
Some documents needed for a welfare exemption were easier for Davenport to get, like the church’s deed of ownership. Others were trickier. For instance,
Davenport needed to provide new Articles of Incorporation. After digging out a decades-old version and working with an attorney to revise it, they hit a wall. To submit the articles — in Davenport’s understanding — they needed new bylaws, which require 30 church members to vote yes. Currently, SBCC doesn’t have that many.
Without the bylaws and the articles, Davenport couldn’t complete another crucial form, the Organizational Clearance Certificate.
“It was almost like a web that was being built that they knew we weren’t going to be able to get out of,” Davenport said.
Throughout the process, Davenport said she felt the assessor’s office was deliberately trying to take the property. At one point, she claimed, an employee lost a packet of documents she had dropped off. She also wondered if the Assessor’s exemptions staff chose to come inspect only when SBCC was empty.
In a written response, Assessor La said that all documents dropped off are stamped and scanned into the system, and that his staff does not know “when a facility is used or not used” and “showed up at the church different times and different days.” When his staff showed up, he noted, the community members they spoke with said the church does not have a congregation.
According to La’s records, after Davenport filed a retroactive welfare exemption claim in 2021, his office responded with clarifying questions but never received a response. This past February, La said, Davenport filed another exemption claim, and his office responded within weeks, saying the documents provided were insufficient. His staff asked Davenport for more forms and records, giving a deadline of May.
Without the “basic documents,” La said, “we are not allowed to proceed with their exemption.” Still, he emphasized, it might not be too late for SBCC to refile and he said he wanted to keep working with her. “The majority of organizations trying to do this end up being successful. It just takes time.”
But time may be running out.
By law, after taxes go unpaid for five years, Hank Levy, Alameda County’s tax collector, is supposed to seize the property. SBCC is well past due. Even if the church regains its tax-exempt status, it could still be on the hook for tens of thousands of dollars in past-due special assessments, though La would have the option of waiving them..
“I try to give people the benefit of the doubt,” Levy said. “I’ve pulled this property off the auction two or three or four times before. … I could do it again, but it’s getting to the point of frustration.”
Unless SBCC’s paperwork is completed properly, the church will probably be auctioned in March 2025, Levy said, alongside other tax-defaulted properties like Finnish Hall, another historic Berkeley building.
With both Finnish Hall and SBCC, Levy will likely try to sell to the highest bidder. Personally, he hopes no one bids; then he could work with nonprofits to purchase them at a lower price, continuing those buildings’ legacy of community service. A nonprofit could also come forward before the auction.
Assessor La recognizes how challenging applying for a welfare exemption can be, especially for small, volunteer-run organizations like SBCC.
“They’re all people who don’t do this for a living, and so they can’t devote the time sometimes they need to get this done,” he said. “We can walk them through it, but at the end of the day, they have to do the walking.”
Throughout the process, Davenport has often been encouraged to stop. “Haven’t you paid your debt?” friends have asked her.
What has largely kept her going, she said, are the needs of South Berkeley.
On a sweltering day in October, Davenport stood in the shade of the church entryway. She pointed to an undeveloped stretch of dirt on the church’s west side. “One of the things I want to do is create a garden over here,” she said.
In her vision, the garden will serve a dual purpose: providing fresh produce for the hunger program while offering the youth program a living, growing classroom. It would allow the kids to plant a seed, “see what it produces, and then utilize it in the kitchen and cook,” she said.
Davenport views it as a lesson in scale — and impact. “I want them to see the full cycle of how something so small as a seed can actually feed people.”
Hayden Royster is a playwright and journalist from Oakland who writes at the intersection of belief, culture, and the outdoors. Find him on X (for now) at @haydenroyster and haydenroyster.com.
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