"demographic equivalent of E=mc2"

Kay S. Hymowitz

Why Spike Lee Is Wrong About Gentrification

We’ve yet to find a better alternative for urban revival.

Autumn 2015

 

BETH J. HARPAZ/AP/CORBIS

 

Columbia Heights, one of several Washington, D.C., neighborhoods that declined during the 1960s, has been transformed by gentrification.

In the 1990s, decades after the riots that followed the 1968 murder of Martin Luther King, the Washington, D.C., neighborhoods of Logan Circle and Columbia Heights still showed scars of that terrible time. Through many of those years, the mostly black residents of those areas would be in luck if they were looking for a prostitute or a drug deal; they had a harder time tracking down fresh spinach or blood-pressure medication. Logan Circle’s elegant Civil War–era mansions were crumbling or boarded up; the turreted row houses of Columbia Heights were in even worse shape.

Still, the local D.C. government was growing aware of the potential of these two neighborhoods, near as they were to federal government offices and the swarm of lobbying and law firms and media and public-relations outfits near them. In 1999, a metro stop opened in Columbia Heights, right across the street from a spiffy new Target. A Whole Foods took up residence a year later in a former auto-parts store near Logan Circle. Fortuitously, the District was at the same moment beginning to catch the eye of a growing number of career-hungry recent college grads.

Read more here. 

Risk

We Must Move

We must move from the realm of abstraction and dreams into the physical realm of risk and results. Risk is ultimately a birthing stage, often marked by sweat, blood and tears, along with moments of ecstatic joy. Something tangible becomes visible and begins to breathe. Our creativity finds form and substance. We sound a call for some new initiative and hope others will respond. Some go from gestation to birth with painful contractions, making this a difficult and anxious stage. Some enter this stage triumphant, just glad to be rid of doubt and indecision. For them, risk feels like a long-awaited adventure. Others feel timid and hesitant, afraid to act and yet more afraid to go back.

Marjory Bankson
Source: The Call to the Soul

Risk

"Nothing that leads to human flourishing happens without risk." 

Andy Crouch

Just hire the guy/gal!

Risk and life

Taking Risks

To live is to take risks. It is absolutely central. Courage and risk are essential to aliveness. And aliveness is the thing that we all strive for and long for, yet sometimes barricade ourselves against out of fear … even as we are still longing for it. If we are not taking risks, it is for the same reason that people do take risks, namely, we want to be alive. We all want the same thing. I’m reminded of an elderly man who lives in a house with a steep wheelchair ramp leading down to the street. There is always a lot of traffic on his street and every morning my friend sees him going full speed down the ramp in his wheelchair. One day she asked him, “Isn’t this dangerous?” And he said with sparks in his eyes, laughing, “Yesss, it is!”

Br. David Steindl-Rast
Source: Mastery--Interviews With Thrity Remarkable People by Joan Evelyn Ames

Add your thoughts at inward/outward

Risk discomfort!

Often, progress is about "breaking out!"

High risk

Not a Low-risk Investment

 The kingdom which was the theme of Jesus' preaching and teaching is not a low-risk, blue-chip investment created for our consumption. It can't be calmly considered and casually digested. It can't be domesticated, nor can its leader be restrained from his continuous challenge to our way of life.

Prologue, The Cotton Patch Parables of Liberation

--Bill Lane Doulos

409

Place is important.

History and memory lead us back toward significant places where things occurred, were planned and executed.

Such a place is 409 N. Haskell Avenue (409) here in Dallas, Texas.

In 1994, thanks to the commitment of Jim and Betsy Sowell, along with the support of many of their friends at the Preston Road Church of Christ and from other churches, Central Dallas Food Pantry purchased the property at 409 to accommodate the expansion and growth of the organization. The property had been purchased from the Resolution Trust Corporation at a very good price.

I arrived at Central Dallas Food Pantry just as the remodel began on this new facility. Previously, the organization ran everything from the much smaller building located at 801 N. Peak Street in the same neighborhood (and that is another story to be told at another time!). The new property signaled a new beginning for what soon would be tagged "Central Dallas Ministries."

With the current development of CitySquare's Opportunity Center, the 409 property is now for sale.

As we move on to the next chapter in our history, it seems appropriate to reflect on all that transpired in this special, unique corner here in inner city, Old East Dallas. So, over the next several months (most likely it will take that long!), I'll be telling stories on this page about the events at 409 that have shaped us all and that have led to the transformation of so many lives.

Thinking about this little memory project brings to mind so many key words and tags. Here are a few just for starters. . .

• Church and Food Pantry
• Seasoned, burned out volunteers from outside the community
• Changes in staff leadership and choice
• Learning the ropes of day-to-day food distribution
• Memorable trips to the North Texas Food Pantry
• A truck without brakes
• Josefina Ortiz
• Conflict and change
• Janet Morrison and contemporaries
• Volunteers who got it
• Theology of urban renewal
• Cocaine campground
• Crack house at the corner
• Pay phone at Crutcher and Haskell
• Getting out a newsletter. . .seriously?
• Jeffie Massey
• Beyond charity
• The Christmas Store
• Dallas Morning News Charities
• Project Access Dallas
• The first Kids Kamp

And, the list goes on and on! 

Stay tuned for short stories and vignettes from our past at this very sacred place where community has been breaking out for years now!

Pictured below are two options for signage on a large, ClearChannel billboard located at the edge of our property where we are constructing the new CitySquare "Opportunity Center."

The billboards have been provided at a great price and point to our new development.

Here's the question: which one do you like the best and why? Your responses will help us make our selection!

Thanks, Ted, I needed that!

So, last week I hear Ted Turner, founder-creator of CNN, tell Lou Dobbs that "we sweated payroll for twenty years."

Wow, that is encouraging!

Running, leading, directing a non-profit corporation is much more like managing a business or a venture capital endeavor than a church, I can tell you for sure.

Taking on real risk, sometimes inordinate risk for the sake of your target audience, the community, is simply the nature of the beast in the world of community development.

But, back to Ted Turner. Twenty years of "sweatin' payroll," now there is an encouraging word!

We sweat payroll every two weeks around my world, and we have for the past 15 years! But, like CNN, we have grown and we have served thousands more people than would have been possible without the commitment to "risk it."

In the process we drive the "sideline" crowd nuts. There are some funders who wish we kept 60 to 90 days minimum in cash reserve. Dream on! I'd love to be able to do that. But, you tell me, how do we walk that road when folks are living every day in such devastating need?

Beyond the need there is the fact that what we know needs to be done just requires capacity to risk.

Our payroll comes in at about $145,000 every other week.

Every single member of our team is devoted to helping relieve the pain and the roadblocking reality of poverty here in Dallas. Every single dollar, I mean every single dollar, is spent in a way that makes a difference for those who are struggling for life and hope.

Risk is simply part of the deal.

Thanks, Ted, I needed to hear that you understand what it means to "sweat" a payroll!

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"The Duty of Delight"

Dorothy Day, one of the founders of the Catholic Worker movement, kept personal diaries throughout her life. She left explicit instructions that her journals not be published or shared with the public until 25 years after her death. Day died in 1980. And now Marquette University Press has published her diaries. Edited by Robert Ellsberg, one of Day's followers from late in her life, the collection of personal reflections is titled The Duty of Delight: The Diaries of Dorothy Day.

Fascinating reading that provides an unique look into the life and soul of Dorothy Day, activist and pilgrim.

Here's an excerpt from Ellsberg's Introduction to the collection:

If Dorothy Day is one day formally canonized, this diary will offer something quite unusual in the annals of the saints--an opportunity to follow, almost day by day, in the footsteps of a holy person. Through these writings we can trace the movements of her spirit and her quest for God. We can see her praying for wisdom and courage in meeting the challenges of her day. But we also join her as she watches television, devours mystery novels, goes to the movies, plays with her grandchildren, and listens to the opera.

Many people tend to think of saints as otherworldly heroes, close to God but not exactly human. These diaries confirm Thomas Merton's observation that sanctity is a matter of being more fully human: "This implies a greater capacity for concern, for suffering, for understanding, for sympathy, and also for humor, for joy, for appreciation for the good and beautiful things of life."

To be human is constantly to fall short of the ideals one sets for oneself. Dorothy Day was no exception. There are frequent reminders in these pages of her capacity for impatience, anger, judgment, and self-righteousness. We are reminded of these things because she herself points them out. ("Thinking gloomily of the sins and shortcomings of others," she writes, "it suddenly came to me to remember my own offenses, just as heinous as those of others. If I concern myself with my own sins and lament them, if I remember my own failures and lapses, I will not be resentful of others. This was most cheering and lifted the load of gloom from my mind. It makes one unhappy to judge people and happy to love them.") And so we are reminded too that holiness is not a state of perfection, but a faithful striving that lasts a lifetime. It is expressed primarily in small ways, day after day, through the practice of forgiveness, patience, self-sacrifice, and compassion.

This will be a good and inspiring read, I can tell already.

[Order a copy of The Duty of Delight by clicking on the Amazon.com thumbnail to the right and below. Your purchase will benefit Central Dallas Ministries!]

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Leveraged

Poverty cannot be effectively challenged without collective action of one kind or another.

This in one of the obvious reasons why some sort of public commitment, involving public funding, will always play an important role in improving life for the urban poor in the United States. Churches and charities simply cannot achieve the scale needed to deliver substantive change.

But, we live in a time of limited public commitment for these purposes.

One thing my work teaches me is that without power or funding, you are forced to adopt highly leveraged strategies.

Being poor as an urban housing developer, for instance, means that you are forced to accept higher interest rates, shorter and more onerous loan terms and more organizational encumberment just to keep advancing, usually extremely slowly and, you pray, surely toward your goal.

As the real life situations facing the urban poor grow more desperate and as the numbers of people continue to increase, you find yourself stretched out thinner and thinner--"leveraged to the max" and still trying to find more space for the creation of hope, the gaining of some small measure of traction into the next month or week or day!

The same issues face us when we turn to community health improvement, workforce training, public education, legal services and advocacy for a better way of life for a larger percentage of our friends.

At every turn, you find yourself holding on to what you have, no matter how meager, and attempting to connect that resource in hand to another that you can see in a new relationship, partner organization or unique opportunity. You keep believing that the sum of the parts is greater than the whole.

For the leveraged life and organization, the status quo is not only unacceptable, it is the greatest enemy you face.

"Oh, come now," it shouts out from the sideline in its cherished security, "you can't do it that way! It's never been done before. It's far too risky. It's just too complicated. You can't hold it together. After all, there are limits here."

I know there is a bit of truth and wisdom buried in that sentiment somewhere. I also know the rest of what's there needs to be kept far away from everyone serious about affecting real change in a city like Dallas, Texas.

Any special investors out there willing to join a new sort of partnership with and among the poor, while we keep working together for a new day of public commitment that surely will arrive eventually? Whether we ever do business together or not, we'd love to hear from you! We find encouraging in simply meeting believers.

Footnote: as our organization attempts to do more and to respond more effectively to the plight of the urban poor, we find ourselves able to identify much more clearly with our very low-income friends who understand the tough art of living highly "leveraged lives" with the little they actually possess.