I go to a church in Overland Park called Heartland Community Church. I'm part of a college group there called 61, which is named after a passage of scripture, Isaiah 61. A few weeks ago, instead of having our normal meeting in the basement of a house owned by the church, we traveled into Kansas City, near Prospect and 31st Street to visit a neighborhood ministry called the Hope Center.
We arrived and met Chris Jehle, who founded the Hope Center in 1998 out of a bible study he had started with several of the local youth.
Before we go on, I caution you not to look at this blog like a pious plug for some proud, hardheaded evangelical street mission that functions as some sort of benevolent field trip so that suburban high school kids can feel like they're changing the world. This is not that ministry. The first thing they tell potential volunteers is not to apply if they aren't willing to commit to at least a year of service.
The folks at the Hope Center approach their jobs with a quiet humility that infuses every part of their lives. They recognize that they have nothing more to offer the neighborhood other than being neighbors themselves.
In this neighborhood, nearly 100 percent of the kids are growing up in single-parent homes. Next to none of these kids know what it's like to have a father, let alone know what a stable marriage is like. Marriage and academic excellence are regarded as undesirable qualities. Those who pursue them are treated like apostates to the culture. One boy was accused of "acting white" by his father because he brought a textbook home from school.
In this neighborhood, only 50 percent of residents own their homes. According to Chris, a healthy neighborhood constitutes at least 70 percent home ownership. Unfair rental situations are common, and they are one of the primary ways people in low-income communities are economically abused. For greedy landlords, there's a lot of money to be made here.
This problem is further compounded by the fact that most of those who do own homes are elderly. They represent the final vestiges of middle-class citizens of the neighborhood. This stable facet of the community is literally dying off, and their properties are being snapped up either by landlords or developers looking to remodel and resell the homes. As an almost universal rule, neither the landlords nor developers live in the communities.
One might take pause at my mentioning of developers: Isn't it good that the houses are being fixed up? Don't we want the neighborhood to improve? Yes and no. Over time, these fix-it-up practices contribute to a trend that becomes incredibly detrimental to the poor who currently inhabit the neighborhood. This trend is called urban gentrification.
To explain, imagine a house in the neighborhood I've been talking about. A developer takes a look at the house, notices that it is only a few miles from downtown and Crown Center and realizes that if there were some nice condos there, the middle class and urban professionals would gladly move in, desiring to live closer to downtown.
In the neighborhood we visited, a normal house generally sells for $30,000. No joke, $30,000. However, when it is completely remodeled, suddenly its property value could shoot up to, let's say $60,000. If half of the homes are remodeled like this, over the course of a few years the average property value rises from $30,000 to $45,000. Sure, it's good for the neighborhood if you're thinking in terms of the actual geographic area. But it's terrible to the current neighbors. Since they can't pay the new, higher rent prices, they are forced to move elsewhere, generally to degraded suburbs. Where they end up is often worse than where they started.
When the poor move into the suburbs, their opportunities are actually more constrained than before: They don't have access to good bus routes and they don't have as many job opportunities within the same geographic radius. Furthermore, they are disoriented as they are thrown into new systems and situations.
While the American urban experience over the last seventy years has been categorized by middle class flight from the city interior and resettlement in the suburbs, The rest of the world's cities have experienced this urban gentrification. As the wealthier classes move back into the city, rising property values force the poor to move into a ring of suburbs outside the city. Paris, Sao Paulo and Calcutta are all examples of this trend. America now seems to be stitching this pattern as well.
The folks at the Hope Center are doing what they can to fight these trends. However, this is not a simple situation of "urban gentrification bad, non-urban gentrification good." Oh how I wish it were that simple. This is a bit more classic. It's a microcosm of the timeless dichotomy between the haves and the have-nots.
It's about how we choose to treat those who have no choice but to follow. Our neighbors who live in these inner-city communities don't have the resources to fight prevailing real-estate practices. How we choose to handle development in urban Kansas City in the next five to ten years will dramatically affect their futures. I cannot say whether we should abstain from moving into the city or not. I don't presume to know what's best.
But one thing is certain. In our haste to create a comfortable world for ourselves, let us not forget our neighbors who are profoundly affected by our choices.