GENTRIFICATION DOESN'T look the same everywhere, but it is happening in most major cities in the U.S. And this isn’t just about the brewpubs, the coffee shops, or even the “cash for houses” signs. As Peter Moskowitz writes in his book How to Kill a City: “Gentrification is the most transformative urban phenomenon of the last half century, yet we talk about it nearly always on the level of minutiae.”
The underlying connection is the economic reality: “Gentrification is a system that places the needs of capital (both in terms of a city budget and in terms of real estate profits) above the needs of the people,” Moskowitz writes. This came up often as I talked with people involved in the complex world of housing and development.
Christian theology offers compelling reasons why individuals and communities can and must care about this dynamic. At the core of Christianity is the call toward love of neighbor. When the poorest of your neighbors continually face the brunt of a system designed not to care about them, gentrification becomes a church issue.
As demographics have shifted, public theology has failed to keep up. Tim Keller, founding pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church (PCA) in New York City, who currently serves as chair of Redeemer City to City (a sister organization that plants new churches in New York and around the world), understands that he has played a role in the growth of urban church planting. When he moved to New York more than 30 years ago, he told Sojourners, gentrification was not on his mind—because it wasn’t yet an issue. But in the 1990s, that started to change as Redeemer saw more people of means moving in.
Now, Keller says, “If you are a church and you care about the common good, then you have to ask yourself: What can we do to help?” He agrees with the stance New York City is taking: that warehousing people in poverty (grouping them in large concentrations) is bad for everyone and that mixed-income neighborhoods are the ideal.
To do this, Keller says, you need community and government policy pressure on developers and businesses to ensure the highest percentage of affordable housing possible. In reality, this approach “forces everyone to be unhappy,” he says. Rents will still rise, some people will be displaced, and developers will have to allocate higher portions of their units to affordable housing. He thinks this should be the goal for all neighborhoods. “Affluent neighborhoods need to be mixed-income as well, which means they need to be building affordable housing and to work hard to make it happen.”
Perhaps Keller can and should be a voice calling out in the wilderness of affluence—it is the very wealthy, after all, who are drastically shaping his adopted city in the most profound ways and need to be held accountable. Others, like Leroy Barber, a nonprofit leader and activist, are focused on listening to and recording the stories of those who are being erased from their own communities and neighborhoods. To Barber, gentrification is the newest iteration of the lack of investment in communities of color. “We allow it to happen,” he says, “and then we ask questions later about what we can do about it, after the damage is done.”
Barber doesn’t see the church being at the forefront of this issue. The churches of color he has visited are primarily in reaction mode, lamenting their new reality. Are people starting to listen?
Shielding people from the market
Beliefs about how to best serve those most at risk for displacement continue to evolve. Habitat for Humanity, for instance, has started to change its approach in recent years, now focusing on entire neighborhoods and community-building by “preserving a supply of housing units that are permanently affordable or otherwise market-shielded.” This happens through a variety of means including subsidized housing, job creation, and grants, with programs, individuals, and governments all working together to maintain a specific number of families in housing. David Heddy, an employee at Habitat in Portland, Ore., says it is complex work, utilizing numerous strategies, organizations, and players—much like juggling 50 balls at a time.
Shielding people from the market has a distinctly Christian ring to it. Most who have studied gentrification bring up the expected caveats—every city is different, there are no quick solutions—and the sense that the market forces of capitalism cannot be stopped. If there is a profit to be made, then the wealthy will pursue it. So, people with a heart for communities have become crafty, and talk in terms of outsmarting or tricking destructive economic forces. Or, as Habitat has done, they see their role as being a barrier between capitalism and the families that are not able to keep up. In an age of ever-increasing inequality, Christians can proclaim people over profits and live out our stated beliefs of loving and caring for our neighbors, particularly when it comes to displacement.
How are churches responding?
Christopher B. James, author of Church Planting in Post-Christian Soil, looked at how church plants operate in Seattle. Based off his studies, James says that “many church planters feel the same allure to gentrifying neighborhoods that real estate developers do—they see a place where their investment is likely to yield a good result.” He doesn’t see the issue being that churches are causing gentrification (although he does liken their impact to that of a hip new coffee shop), but rather that it is primarily a theological problem: Christians not understanding the incarnation, resulting in “a failure to grasp what it looks like to join God in the renewal of all things from a position of ultimate solidarity with your God-given neighbors.”
Cole Brown helped plant a church in Northeast Portland, Ore., in 2006—when the historically black neighborhood was in the middle stages of gentrification. The church he helped start wanted to exist as a “third neighborhood” as one community was pushed out and another moved in. Brown said that the “racial tension was intense, impossible to ignore” but that their church “became a safe place for people to know and be known, transform and be transformed, while the neighborhood outside was not safe for any of the above.”
According to Brown, in their church white gentrifiers got to know long-term residents of color who were experiencing financial constraints, with the result of some people sharing housing. Some members with means also purchased homes and rented at below-market rates to other members who were in danger of displacement.
Dr. Mark Strong has been pastor of primarily African-American Life Change Church, also in Northeast Portland, for more than 25 years. Gentrification has drastically changed his neighborhood. People have been displaced, and so have gathering places and iconic community spaces as people have been pushed to the outer edges of the city.
Strong says it has changed the mission of his church—now, to reach newcomers, they must work across cultural and ethnic barriers. It is hard work, he says, but ultimately worth it. They are also planting a church in an eastern suburb of Portland, following displaced communities of color. Life Change embodies two responses in rapidly changing contexts: trying to adapt at their original location, and extending their mission to where their original community is resettling, so they can keep ministering in that population.
Institutional churches are also entering into the conversation, as evidenced by Tyler Sit, pastor of New City Church, a United Methodist congregation in Minneapolis. Sit, along with minister of public witness Dana Neuhauser, originally wanted to focus their church plant around creation care. They soon realized that gentrification was also a major issue that needed to be addressed. Sit says their church primarily combats the dehumanizing forces of capitalism and displacement by creating a worship time that allows people—including the myriad of burnt-out activists in the neighborhood—to connect with the love of God.
Neuhauser sees their church as joining in the transforming work of God in the world—both inwardly and outwardly. Minneapolis as a city is in a housing crisis, with a vacancy rate of less than 3 percent (the national average is 7 percent). New City is engaged in both policy advocacy and building personal and community relationships. They plant fruit trees in the yards of neighbors, a sign of abundance and long-term stability. They are working to build more backyard farms, concentrating wealth and income-generating elements for families who often need to work several jobs to pay rent. They are also thinking big—what would it look like to have a land trust, for instance, that kept housing perpetually affordable?
While it is encouraging that some churches are thinking through both the theology and practice of how to live incarnationally and shield people and properties from the market, they are still in the minority. And it also begs the question of why such shielding is needed. We can’t address mass displacement without acknowledging why gentrification exists and is so extreme in certain cities.
Again, Moskowitz cuts right to the heart of the issue: “Gentrification is not about individual acts; it’s about systemic violence based on decades of racist housing policy in the United States that has denied people of color, especially black people, access to the same kinds of housing, and therefore the same levels of wealth, as white Americans. Gentrification cannot happen without this deeply rooted inequality.”
Christians, who espouse a theology of sin, should not be surprised at the brokenness that stems from policies that have privileged the white and wealthy for centuries. As we learn about the issues, may we also live as if the good news of Jesus means something to those who are experiencing displacement and the destruction of cultural and social centers.
Philippians 1:27 says to “conduct yourselves in a manner worthy of Christ.” In the Greek, “conduct yourselves” means to “live as a citizen.” To be engaged in your neighborhood, your place of witness. To work with your city to upend the ways of the world, and to see people valued over profits—this is an expression of faith that is urgently needed.
D.L. Mayfield is a neighbor and writer in Portland, Ore. Their book, The Myth of the American Dream: Reflections on Affluence, Autonomy, Safety, and Power was released in May 2020.
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