Old Church Becomes New Home—By Camas Frank

San Luis Obispo residents wondering just what happened to the Springfield Baptist Church on Broad Street may have noticed some changes in the neighborhood lately.
Purchased in June 2013 after years of volunteer work by Cal Coast Construction owner Caleb Lopez to maintain the structure, the contractor says he’s sunk everything he can afford into making the former House of God into a respectfully restored residence.
The 2-story building, first constructed as a Mormon Church in 1923, has changed hands, hosting several congregations, but has always historically been a church.
It’s been a Church of Christ, the Foursquare Gospel Church and became Springfield Baptist sometime around 1947. Lopez has been researching the history of the building as well as the murky dealing of San Luis Obispo’s racially segregated past.
“It was one of the first black churches in San Luis Obispo County,” he said, noting that records for the building are harder to trace because white intermediaries, including a member of the SLO City Council at the time, were often used the property rights and loans attached to the Church.
In 2009, having become acquainted with the congregation, Lopez began volunteering time and materials to keep the building up in the face of more stringent building codes, including a seismic retrofit, running in the neighborhood of $500,000 in order to continue as a public meeting place.
“There were some pretty extreme deadlines and they were about a month away,” said Lopez, so he started working with the City to get a 3-year extension that was granted on the condition that certain work was done.
Never-the-less the costs were too much for a congregation of approximately 40, mostly elderly and disabled parishioners.
“After three years we just couldn’t do the entire retrofit and the pastor decided it was time to throw in the towel,” Lopez added.
With the building still up for sale, he worked out a deal, and a development plan for the property that would no longer require the public gathering safety standards. For a time, investors looked at the feasibility of a mixed-use commercial and residential use for the property, but with the property squarely planted between two, single family homes and residential zoning on the westerly side of Broad Street, City planners were happier with the home conversion.
“The codes are much different for residential,” Lopez said. “The standard steel beams that would be required for most retrofit on buildings from the 20’s were actually in there from the original construction. It was pretty impressive.”
In fact much of the needed work to bring the building up to residential code standards was already done in the 1980s and with further retrofits in 1996. A lot of what Lopez has ended up doing with the interior is restoration, taking out modifications made in the 1960s and restoring the original design. He’s keeping the stained glass and other religious reminders too, but the exterior definitely has changed with a new snappy paint job.
“It’s very emotional work for me,” said Lopez, whose father was a pastor. “To live in a church will be as cool as it gets for me with my family history.” Construction on the site is expected to be done in February 2015.