NPR's Morning Edition is airing a week-long series on the changing demographics in US cities. One of the driving forces of these changes is gentrification, as this segment on Washington, D.C. highlights.
While the days of "white flight" into the suburbs are ostensibly coming to an end, the inverse is now happening in equally damaging ways. Generation Y is filtering back into the urban neighborhoods abandoned by their parents and grandparents in the face of forced segregation in the 1960s and 70s. Drawn by numerous factors, including the charming convenience of the city and the opportunity to participate in restoration, gentrifiers are allowing "market forces" to force low-income residents out of areas with rising property values and taxes. The gentrifiers don't mind. Just as the generations before them, they manipulate noble virtues to create homogeneous communities, typically with just enough diversity to satiate their politically correct consciences.
As a resident of downtown Birmingham, how can I abstain from the harm gentrification brings? How can I participate in Christ-like community development without reshaping my neighborhood according to my white, middle class values? How can those interested in improving schools and cleaning up neighborhoods (like the East Lake group from the Church at Brook Hills) do so without evicting those residents they theoretically want to help?
I think about this problem A LOT. I think you've nailed it: "Just as the generations before them, they manipulate noble virtues to create homoogeneous communities, typically with just enough diversity to satiate their politically correct consciences."
ReplyDeleteI have much more to say, but alas, I must commute to my office, which is two blocks south of Lakeshore Dr. and thus two blocks into the land of perdition... maybe one day my pious urbanite friends will help me see the light?