Gentrification Isn't the Problem

This article appears in the February 2018 issue of Sojourners magazine. To subscribe, click here .

TO LOOK AT HIM, you know he’s lived a hard life. With ridges creasing his 27-year-old face, my cousin Shack looked me in the eye during a family gathering and helped me understand how hopeless he feels. The people in his Newark, N.J. neighborhood are being pushed out of their community. The Whole Foods and condos that are moving in are raising the costs of rent and food. The neighborhood’s old guard can’t keep up.

This is the case in almost every city across the country.

In my own neighborhood—Petworth in Washington, D.C.—I have watched condos rise around me and Starbucks and small bistros move in over the last six years. When I moved here in 2011, taxi drivers and community veterans told me that, until recently, they considered Petworth one of the most dangerous and impoverished neighborhoods in D.C. Gutted by the violent uprising in response to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, the adjacent neighborhood Columbia Heights lay abandoned by city services and industry, and given over to poverty and violence, for more than three decades. When the city decided to develop Columbia Heights, it was only a matter of time before they would do the same to Petworth.

“But gentrification is not the problem,” Shack said. “Poverty is the problem.”

I heard those words and I wanted to push back. The anti-poverty advocate in me wanted to say, “Get with the program, cuz. Gentrification is the devil.” But Shack had a point, a good one. Obviously, repair and development of the neighborhood isn’t the problem—it’s the displacement of often-poorer people by more affluent people that usually goes with it. These neighborhoods should have been repaired and developed decades ago according to the desires of their homeowners and residents.

African-American communities didn’t want to lay fallow. No one wanted to walk through blocks of decaying buildings, navigating drug dealers and gang members. No one wanted to travel far to get healthy fresh fruits and vegetables. Black neighborhoods were starved of resources, repair, sanitation services, businesses, jobs—starved to death.

In the throes of death, they survived by creating alternative economies, under the table businesses, some legal and some illegal. There is no legal recourse when someone is wronged in illegal trade, thus violent action often becomes the alternative to courts, juries, and law enforcement. It was not uncommon to hear gunshots outside my window during the first two years I lived in Petworth.

What stops the cycle? Investment in black people and the infrastructure of their communities. Investment in their local businesses and health, as well as a renunciation of the structural lie that 1930s segregationists embedded in this country’s land value system through the Federal Housing Administration’s mortgage policy. In its earliest years, the policy laid the groundwork for the present-day belief that black neighborhoods are less worthwhile than white ones.

For the black community in Petworth, one of the turning points in our season of disparity was the redevelopment of our local supermarket. Watching black families stream into the local market, which was full of fresh vegetables and fruit, was beautiful. And seeing how the market added jobs to the local economy was powerful.

Development does not have to be the death of black neighborhoods. The presence of Starbucks should not mean our demise. We like good coffee, too; we just need the means to buy it. We need jobs. We need businesses to hire people from the community. We need books in our schools and stop signs on our streets. And we need the U.S. government to take responsibility for how it ravaged our communities.

Our nation’s collective view of blackness must be corrected.

For we, too, are made in the image of God. We, too, are called by God, created with the capacity to steward and cultivate the world.

Poverty is the problem, not development.