Gentrification seems to be following me around. This process by which a neighborhood changes to be higher income as developers flip houses and build luxury homes, and landlords raise rents, happened in the D.C. neighborhood where I grew up and it’s happening where I live now, on the Lower West Side of Chicago.
What can any of us do about it? We can’t all devote our careers or even a chunk of them to creating or preserving affordable housing. Three cheers for the people who do! Bob Pohlman was one of them. His efforts had a significant effect in preserving a relatively large amount of economic and racial diversity in our neighborhood, Mount Pleasant in D.C. Bob was part of the Community of Christ, the ecumenical congregation where I was raised and that I’m researching and writing a book about, located in Mount Pleasant for four of its five decades. Bob also made a big difference through the La Casa building at 3166 Mount Pleasant Street where the CofC worshiped.
This month’s issue of Sojourners has an article by Amanda Huron, who also grew up in Mount Pleasant and the CofC, about La Casa as a neighborhood commons. When the CofC ended, members wanted to keep it a space for community benefit. They decided, as Amanda writes, that “the logic of the market need not guide all such decisions.”
Amanda’s article, “How to give away your church and fight gentrification at the same time,” gives a good amount of detail* about how CofC members chose an organization from among its partners in mission and transferred the building rather than selling it for the highest bid, which would have been well more than $1 million. The building is now La Clínica del Pueblo’s Health and Action Center, with programs such as support groups for LGBTQ people who speak Spanish. CofC members who led the decision making saw even more clearly in the CofC’s dying what its purpose had been in its collective life of faith, and how its ministry would live on, Amanda wrote.
Inspired by my home church, my husband and I are moving to share a two-flat home with friends, combining joint ownership with some level of intentional community in our daily and weekly lives. This requires my husband and I to sell the single-family home we have owned for six years. Also in the spirit of CofC, we are seeking to preserve the property as affordable housing for another family rather than selling to one of the for-profit developers filling our mailbox with flyers as market prices in the area climb. We’re still working on the details, but we hope that through this one small action we can make our values concrete, literally (well, plus brick and other building materials).
*If you’d like more of the nitty-gritty, drop me a line and I can connect you with documents or people.
Gathered and Scattered book update
I’ve spent countless hours this past month creating and correcting transcriptions from interviews I did with people from the Community of Christ. Amanda Huron, who in addition to the article above has written a book, Carving out the Commons: Tenant Organizing and Housing Cooperatives in Washington, D.C., recommended transcription software and now I’m hooked. I feel like someone doing laundry for the first time after washing machines were invented.
But of course as with any such process, there are mistakes. Since we can all use a good belly laugh, here are the top three voice-to-text transcriptions errors that had me guffawing:
[00:05:37] And so obviously the horse came through. And we eloped.
[00:55:45] Then tonight a little wine and there were many nights that we knew. But where was it? Overseas.
[00:12:42] What was that Groucho one saying? What? No, no, no, no, no.
The first one, corrected, is “And so the divorce came through, and we eloped.” The beginning of the second one was “Mennonites—now why do I know? Ah. There were Mennonites that we knew.” In the third, the audio recording got garbled by an unstable Internet connection, so it’s lost exactly what the question was.
Reading and listening
My review of Lisa Donovan’s book, where she “saves sugarcoating for her pastries” in writing about exploitation of workers, domestic violence, community, and family.
Lisa Donovan tells the stories behind the recipes
Our Lady of Perpetual Hunger exposes the misogyny within the restaurant industry.
While the Sundays for which I wrote these Sunday’s Coming blog posts for the Christian Century are past, the reflections on mutual aid, solidarity, and activism have broader interest.
What Paul’s thorn in the flesh taught him
As we strive to act for social justice, we’d do well to ask ourselves if we have a thorn in the flesh to keep us from exalting ourselves above others. Once we’ve identified it, we may have a better understanding of our own power and weakness.
We all have needs—and abundance.
Earlier this month I turned 38. On childhood birthdays, I loved for my family to put Stevie Wonder’s record Hotter than July on the turntable and play “Happy Birthday.” My activist parents taught me that the song was part of the successful campaign to make the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday a national holiday. That only amplified the joy of dancing to the song while imagining a day when “peace is celebrated / All throughout the world.” Stevie Wonder’s chorus is also 100 times better than the traditional birthday song, musically speaking.