Left-Over Joy and just urban renewal...

So last night was a great night, we had a bunch of people over that we've met and connected with in our short 5.5 months that we've been here...we told everyone to bring over their left-overs, and if they didn't have any, then bring themselves and we were going to eat as a family.  So we moved stuff out of our living room, brought tables and chairs over from the church and had a wonderful little family dinner!  It was cool being there with everyone, eating, laughing...i got to sit next to the kids which gave me the freedom to really have fun and goof off...i will always feel most at home at the kid's table!  My favorite part was we had white, black, hispanic, homeless, young, old...all around the table.  Althought we weren't specifically celebrating the Lord's Supper, I was blessed that we were all one at the table, together, without any pretenses or segregation...even Chance behaved himself :) .

I was talking with Ceaser who was sitting across from me most of the night, he's the cousin of one of our neighbor and we got to talking about faith and life and the power of walking with Christ...and then we moved into talking about community building and others joined in bringing up the double-edged sword of urban renewal.   The inevitable result of urban renewal is gentrification, where property then becomes more valuable and those who currently live in that neighborhood are displaced and forced to leave the neighborhoods they've lived in for so long.

Mandy and I have been talking for a long time about how we can ensure that gentrification happens justly, and I remember having that chat with a few friends as well (Capoz)...and as we were talking I said something like this...

'We hope that what we do here, what happens as a result of Jesus living through us that there could be a spirit, a culture that grows in our neighborhood because of those who live there and how they come together...that if there is a question of renewal, if something has the potential of being built that could bring in money or whatever...that our question would then be..."how will this affect the 'spirit' of our neighborhood?  If it affects it in such a way that results in forcing...ok, side note, i'm in a coffee-shop and a guy just told his friend about the time he was dared to drink KFC gravy mixed with Vodka, wowsas...if it affects it in such a way that results in affecting the 'spirit', the culture that has made our neighborhood valuable, the community wouldn't want to allow that.

I sat there for a second and said...huh...maybe that's how gentrification could happen justly...and then the immensity of that project became real and little overwhelming...but, out of that came hope...thoughts?