6  LAMENT FOR THE LAND

CERTAIN PARTS OF PORTLAND historically have been redlined—places White people deemed unworthy and grew to see as hazardous. These districts are primarily in the north and northeast section and are where 75 percent of our city’s African American population used to reside because it was the only place they could get a loan. Today, a person walking around these parts of Portland will see hundreds of “Black Lives Matter” signs. They are placed in front of gorgeous old Craftsman-style homes—homes that now, after decades of inequality, are finally deemed desirable. I see the signs everywhere, standing on their rickety metallic legs, proudly proclaiming their message of inclusivity.

But I hardly see any actual Black lives in that neighborhood. They have been pushed out to the surrounding suburbs by rising rents, scattered like seeds in the winds of capitalism, their institutions left behind to adapt or die, their roots spreading out in all directions, looking for a place to regroup.

I wonder how much those signs cost. A few dollars, perhaps. But the relief it must give the homeowners is incalculable.

Jeremiah 29:11 is a verse I often heard growing up: “‘I know the plans I have for you,’ declares the LORD, ‘plans to prosper you and not to harm you, to give you a hope and a future’” (NIV). But it wasn’t until after I was friends with refugees for many years that I began to see the extra layers of this verse. As a serious-minded Christian, and one who went to Bible college, I still had a hard time placing myself in the biblical narrative. I had what might be called the problem of familiarity—I was too close to many of the stories to see them clearly. But one day, staying at a beach house owned by friends of my parents, staring at a picture of a lighthouse with the familiar words of Jeremiah written on it, something snapped. In a gorgeous setting, in someone’s third house, it suddenly struck me how uncomfortable I was with out-of-context Scriptures. Especially if they turned the living Word of God into nothing more than a bland promise from a faceless deity that my life was destined for something good.

The book of Jeremiah was written to a devastated people, people who struggled mightily to reconcile their faith in a living God with the suffering they experienced as their world crumbled and they became the marginalized in a society built on power and wealth. Going back and reading Jeremiah 29 in context—the chapter is called “A Letter to the Exiles”—I found a poignant word of solidarity for the displaced: a fresh vision to build houses, settle down, make gardens, marry, have children, seek the peace and prosperity of the city that you were exiled to by God. To imagine a new future out of the ashes of the old.

It’s a gorgeous promise in Scripture, but it isn’t necessarily for me. As a third generation American, I’m not living in exile, nor am I in any danger of it. I have more in common with the Babylonians, the oppressors. The promise of flourishing is peripheral to me. But it still means something. It opens me up to asking why exile is such an important theme in the Bible. It opens me up to wondering if I could be living in Babylon. It opens me up to wondering how the idols of Babylon might have become my own.

Gentrification is a big deal in Portland. Gentrification is not fundamentally about hip coffee shops moving into poor neighborhoods or rising rents or even the forced displacement of people. Movement, and change and growth are not necessarily things to be feared, nor are they all bad. Integration—finding a way to live in places where there is a real diversity of incomes and backgrounds—has benefits for nearly everyone, from raising test scores in schools to encouraging the wealthy to give more.

Gentrification occurs when certain groups of people capitalize on the historic and strategic disinvestment of communities of color. As Peter Moskowitz writes in How to Kill a City, “It’s not that most poor people or people of color hate the idea of anyone moving to the city, but that gentrification almost always takes place on top of someone else’s loss.”1 Gentrification is the pursuit of affluence by people of privilege in a world where the scales have always been tipped. Gentrifiers are unified by their lack of curiosity to the ways the American Dream has been particularly good to them. Gentrification is waiting for the coffee shop that caters to your taste to open up before you spend money in the neighborhood. It’s waiting until the local schools have a more acceptable diversity ratio before sending your kids there. It’s capitalizing on what’s best for you and yours while continuing to disinvest in those communities that have been erased from the narrative of the American Dream. It’s putting up a sign that says certain lives matter, even as you profit off of their displacement.

Theologian Lisa Sharon Harper writes that “Shalom is what the kingdom of God smells like.” She goes on to say that “if one’s gospel falls mute when facing people who need the good news the most—the impoverished, the oppressed, the broken—then it’s no good news at all.”2 For quite some time now I’ve been paying attention to who the good news of the American Dream is good for. Now it’s time to be oriented in the other direction, to train my eyes and ears toward those who have been saying consistently that all is not well.

Jeremiah 29:11 was never intended to be an inspirational poster in someone’s beach house, especially in an area where some own multiple homes while others cannot find a safe place to lay their heads. But it contains within it the seeds for what those of us who are closer to the power and status of the Babylonians are to do. Those of us from the dominant culture are invited to pay attention to the inequality in the systems that have benefited us, and we’re invited to move our gaze elsewhere. To become downwardly oriented, obsessed with shalom not just for ourselves but for the people who are struggling the most in our midst. We are to help the exiles within our society to flourish: to plant gardens, find housing, nurture and grow their families. When we do this, we are promised that we too will finally find the peace that we crave. We will be rich in love, and in the joy of seeing God’s dream for the world come alive before us.

In the apartments where we lived on the edge of Portland, the rent kept rising like a river about to overflow. Every year the monthly rents climbed over a hundred dollars a month. Our neighbors, mostly recently arrived refugees and immigrants, did not know how they could keep up. My husband had a good job and still it was a shock to us to get the bills, ever higher. Our apartments weren’t getting any nicer (there were still bugs and mice and no screens on the windows) but we were paying more and more money.

We watched as the dumpsters behind the apartments filled with furniture, the tell-tale sign of evictions piling up. We watched as notices went up for new developments being built in the neighborhood, revitalization projects that boasted the promise of open-air markets, job share sites, and condos. I walked the neighborhood with my two children in tow, anguished at the thought of everyone I loved leaving because they couldn’t pay the rent anymore. But what was I to do?

One day I went to a meeting about a new proposed site. They asked the community for their input, so I gave mine. I went up to the microphone in front of a long table filled with city council members. They looked at me, unblinking, and I shrunk inside myself. My voice wavering slightly, I told them what our neighborhood needed most was affordable rents, a green park for children to play in, and a community space that was free where we could have English classes or weddings or quinceañeras. The man who was in charge of the project gave me a tight smile. “All of that sounds great,” he said. “But we have to make sure there are income generating elements, or this project won’t be viable.”

I felt as small and as foolish as a child. There I was blathering on about parks and community centers to people who knew much more about the economy of my neighborhood than I did. I sat down. I knew nothing would be changed. And yet forever in the record of that meeting would be my tiny, quavering note of dissent. One neighbor, saying that green spaces, community spaces, places that were not necessarily profitable but were desired and necessary and deserving. My lament would be typed, filed, and ultimately ignored.

Now it is a few years later, and the rents continue to go up. Neighbors have left or are leaving. We work out our laments both by voicing our concerns and by organizing with others to advocate for renters rights, to protest developments, to plead with developers to think about the families that need affordable housing. I walk by the site of the place where the revitalization project is supposed to be coming. They fenced off the old park and it has sat unused for over two years. My children cling to the fence and ask me why we can’t go in there anymore. I tell them something is going to be built, someday a new place for new neighbors is coming. But for now, it remains closed to us and to our community. The people who live here, the ones with children longing for a play structure or a green space to run around, walk by signs that proclaim that one day it will all be made new. By that time, I wonder how many of us will remain.