Gentrification and Urban Mission

There is a tension many of us face in the U.S. when it comes to Urban Mission. If you are white (though not necessarily), middle-class, and educated, you bring a certain culture with you, wherever you go. That is essentially gentrification. It is a bit of a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't situation, and it is happening in our neighborhood right now. I have recently been getting lots of emails from our Neighborhood Association, generally well-intentioned I might add. They usually entail something like, "have you noticed the people offering to shovel snow...seems like a convenient way to case a house during the holidays" or "watch out for people who drive slowly, they may be interested in stealing metal from your house."

I hear that! The last thing a Neighborhood Association wants is people driving slowly and offering to help each other in a snow storm. So someone posed to me, "what do YOU do?" Am I part of the gentrification? Gentrification really is not a racial issue, but there is a racial tie often associated with the socio-economic group that moves in and the group displaced. It seems if you are part of the hegemony, you are either gentrifying by moving into low-income areas, or contributing to economic, usually racial, segregation through homogeneous congregation.

There really is no benevolent choice in either, but there are bad choices. I think the worst choice is to move into a neighborhood with the intention to "transform" it, but through investing in transforming your own property. Gentrification happens when the following unfolds without engaging the core of the neighborhood:

Someone who can afford to live in other neighborhoods chooses a low-income neighborhood, buys a cheap house, uses the savings to fix it up, buys a $100 rain barrel from Whole Foods, and develops an isolated utopia with a great front yard garden...maybe even forming a Neighborhood Association. This raises property values and taxes and pushes out the people who made THEIR life in that neighborhood. The only upside is it probably chokes off the slum-Lords. (I am looking at you Mark, with the white pick-up, who owns the boarding houses on Franklin Street and evicted a jobless man who was going through chemo for Throat Cancer).

Our Neighborhood Association breeds mistrust of the people living on the fringes and it communicates primarily through meetings setup through online social networking, excluding the long time residents who (based on KNOWING most of my neighbors), do not have computers. There is only one solution...the choice of the Christian (though not exclusively).

You can segregate or you can gentrify...or you can be a middle-class person, move into a low-income neighborhood to save money, and instead of re-investing that money into a Prius and hard-wood floors, you can use it to empower your NEIGHBORS to invest in their homes, their gardens, and to simply have them over for a meal. This is beautification, enrichment, in the name of God, which does not displace, but empowers.

I know Christians doing this in our neighborhood. They care for single moms, they invest money in re-decorating OTHER people's houses, they share meals...and I might add I never get emails from them about "suspicious" activity, because they know who those people are. Those people actually know the man others always see walking around with long hair, dark hats, and just looking at people's houses...and those Christians know he is not a creepy predator...he is Keith, a 53 year old long time resident with special needs, who lives on his own.