The vast majority of the parish’s property is in Hudson Square, a commercial neighborhood next to the Manhattan entrance to the Holland Tunnel. These days, the area’s hulking prewar industrial buildings, designed for use by printing companies, are increasingly occupied by creative and technology companies, with restaurants and galleries on the street level.

“The Trinity Church properties are now among the most valuable in all of New York City, because they are sitting on the edge of the hottest neighborhoods in the city — SoHo, TriBeCa and Greenwich Village,” said Mitchell L. Moss, a professor of urban policy and planning at New York University. “Trinity has been either very wise or very prudent, but they have let the market mature around them, and now they are ready to take advantage of it.”

The church, which calls itself “one of the largest landowners in Manhattan,” has also been building an equity investment portfolio that was worth about $160 million in 2011. And the value of Trinity’s real estate holdings is expected to grow because rezoning of much of the church’s land will allow up to 3,200 new residential units, with the first large project planned for Duarte Square on Canal Street.

“The legacy of Queen Anne is that Trinity Church is going to prosper in the 21st century,” Mr. Moss said. “Who says that the empire doesn’t live on?”

Mr. Bates, who says he wants the church to be more accountable to its members, argues in his lawsuit that the parish vestry, which acts largely as Trinity’s board of directors, is being elected contrary to the terms of the church’s original 1697 charter.

Mr. Bates claims that each vestry candidate must receive a majority of parishioners’ votes to be elected. The church says that even one “yes” vote is enough if the candidate is uncontested; all the seats are uncontested. The parish has asked for the suit, filed in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, to be dismissed. The dispute over spending and governance is, in part, a dispute over the leadership of the Rev. James H. Cooper, who has been the church’s rector since 2004.

“You have diminished Trinity Church, and you have created a glaring atmosphere of deceit,” wrote one longtime vestry member, Lorraine LaHuta, in her 2012 resignation letter.