Speaking from experience in the Philadelphia region, the legacy of old buildings is something of a burden. The area I'm in now was built up before cars were co

Speaking from experience in the Philadelphia region, the legacy of old buildings is something of a burden. The area I'm in now was built up before cars were commonplace - implication being churches built closely enough to be within walking distance. Flash forward a century, and the situation is a combination of fewer people attending churches and more ability for those that do to travel. There are also more competing interests for people's time, so there's less ability and desire for parishioners to engage in volunteer activities at churches. Attending church on Sunday morning might mean missing a little league game and attending a work day at the parish might mean missing a school event or similar. (With fewer activities centered around church than before, there's more opportunity for schedule contention that the churches often lose.) What this means for an individual parish is that there are fewer resources available for maintaining an aging and likely historic building. There are fewer people committing money to the church and fewer people able to volunteer work at the church. The flip side of this is that there are also fewer practical reasons to maintain an old church. Shutting down a church with 50 people in weekly attendance is easier than shutting down a church with 300 people in attendance. The trouble with this line of reasoning is that it papers over some of the more sentimental reasons for keeping a parish running. Those 50 remaining folks are also the people most likely to have a strong connection to the parish... or they'd have already left. So individual parishes can have more inertia to stay open than you might expect. Moving up to the diocese level, a parish shutting down can transfer many of the funding/transport issues from the parish to the diocese. The diocese, which may have problems of its own, now has additional burdens to take on as it both loses revenue (from parish remittances) and gains expenses. This implies a potentially strong incentive for a diocese to sell off old properties. The trouble with a sale is the large number of stakeholders that might be opposed to such a sale. Never underestimate the difficulties that can be thrown up by 'interested parties'. Shutting down a parish can easily involve current and former parishoners, the diocese level, local planning/zoning boards, historical building regulations... the list goes on and on. (And you still have to find a developer with the intent, resources, and ability to take on the property and turn it into something the community wants.) The reason I go down this path is mainly to illustrate that the notion of churches as pools of free resources is somewhat dubious at best. Whatever resources are there are not only special purpose to begin with, but also can sequestered behind history, regulation, and interests that are difficult to overcome.