What it does not do, which is the part boards ask about

HB 333 operates entirely within KRS Chapter 100 — Kentucky's planning and zoning chapter. Every word of the preemption is directed at what a planning unit may require. Nothing in the Act mentions covenants, declarations, or community associations, and nothing in it purports to reach a private recorded restriction.

So a church-owned parcel inside a covenanted community still answers to the declaration. If the recorded restrictions limit the parcel to single-family residential use, or require architectural approval, or prohibit multi-unit structures, HB 333 does not displace any of that. What it removes is the public hearing, the conditional use permit and the discretionary review — not the private contract.

That is the same design the General Assembly used across the board in 2026. The zoning-deregulation bills that failed carried express clauses preserving association restrictions; the manufactured-housing preemption that succeeded expressly preserves “restrictions contained in recorded deeds, covenants, or developers' subdivision restrictions.” HB 333 achieves the same result by staying inside Chapter 100 rather than by writing a savings clause.

The realistic exposure for a Kentucky association

Read the geography conditions carefully and the collision risk with an established residential community is low but not zero.

Two of the three permitted locations are outside residential neighbourhoods entirely — commercial or business zones, and former school buildings. The third is the one to watch: a parcel in a residential zone that is both adjacent to a state primary road and adjacent to a commercial, business or industrial parcel. That describes the edge of a subdivision, not its middle — a church on the arterial at the entrance to the neighbourhood.

Where such a parcel is inside the covenanted scheme, the association's questions are the ordinary ones:

• Is the parcel actually burdened? Church parcels are frequently carved out of the parent tract before the declaration is recorded, or conveyed by a deed that omits the restrictions. Kentucky's one published community-association decision this year held that a covenant does not burden land whose own chain of title omits it, whatever the rest of the subdivision's deeds say. That is a title question and it is answerable now.
• What does the restriction say? “Residential purposes only” does not obviously exclude affordable housing, which is residential. A restriction to single-family dwellings, or one lot per dwelling, is a different matter.
• Does architectural review apply? Where it does, it survives untouched — though Kentucky's courts held in May 2026 that arbitrary rejection of plans conforming to specific and unambiguous covenants is unenforceable. A board refusing on aesthetic grounds needs a provision to point at.

The recorded encumbrance boards will actually encounter

Whatever happens with zoning, one artefact of this Act will appear in Kentucky title records: a fifteen-year affordability deed restriction on the developed parcel, required by the statute to be recorded.

For an association, that is a second recorded restriction on a lot inside its scheme — which Kentucky law permits. In December 2025 the Court of Appeals confirmed that property may be subject to more than one set of recorded restrictive covenants at the same time, rejecting an owner's argument that a second layer required the parent tract's amendment procedure.

The affordability restriction and the association's declaration would coexist. Neither displaces the other, and a board reviewing a resale or an estoppel request on such a parcel should expect to see both.

What to watch next

The Act's operation depends on how planning units read “ministerial review.” A planning unit that treats the enumerated conditions as a checklist is complying; one that reintroduces discretion under the guise of verifying compliance is not. No Kentucky court has construed the section, and none will until a religious developer is refused.

The 1 January 2026 purchase cut-off also means the eligible pool is fixed and closed. This is not a statute that grows — every parcel it will ever reach was already owned by a religious institution before the Act passed.