What has gentrification ever done for us?

Pray and Work: Ora et Labora woodcut by Ade Bethune, 1935, Ade Bethune Collection, St Catherine

Just down the road from Giuseppe Conlon House in Hackney, in the same borough as the London Catholic Worker’s weekly soup kitchen, Urban Table, there is an unmistakable whiff of gentrification about the place, with all the changes going on.

Some might call it regeneration, others gentrification, others social cleansing even. The Catholic Worker would call it clarification. Dorothy Day writes, in Loaves and Fishes [1], ‘Poverty is a strange and elusive thing [..] We need always to be thinking and writing about it, for if we are not among its victims its reality fades from us. We must talk about poverty because people insulated by their own comfort lose sight of it.’

There is plenty to laugh about how bad things were in the bad old days: an infrequent train service and a bus that only went half its route on Sundays. Before mobile phones, in the early nineties, my street was a sort of crack superstore; customers would stand in a row, staring in the direction of the high street, looking out for the dealer’s gold BMW.

Improved transport links, street furniture, cycle routes, regular rubbish collections, decent schools, more restaurants and cafes to choose from; the benefits of gentrification are obvious. Above all, an expansion in housing and therefore population. What’s not to like.

However there is also a housing crisis. House prices have risen out of the reach of most. Young people and those on low incomes have to rely on renting from private landlords, who can then charge as much as they like. Private rents in London are now 72% of income. Meanwhile anyone who is homeless, even if they are housed in the area, the minute they get a job and lose their housing benefit they won’t be able to afford the rent. The message of gentrification is: if you can’t afford to live here, move out.

I was looking around for an alternative proposition, perhaps an anarchist view on the situation. One housing expert friend suggested that, short of a riot, the way to bring house prices down was for all the school children to fails their GCSEs. Another warned, ‘Laws will be broken’. A mass squat.

Then I found ‘Hope and Rage’, an experimental series of six discussions on gentrification. Rob Schellert, the facilitator, told me he set up the group after feeling angry and frustrated at the evangelical churches’ response to the changes in his neighbourhood. He feels church Christianity has nothing to say about the real life issues present. The church he said just tends to be about ‘spiritual stuff’ and offered no discipleship. It offers only a superficial response to what it means to love our neighbour.

The sessions covered transport, shopping, socializing, education, and included an expert speaker, information from local government sources, and a scripture passage. As a group, we put our comfort filled domestic lives, under scrutiny, from a radical Christian perspective.

My first task was to speak to local people about their experience of gentrification in Hackney, so I combined this with setting up a justice and peace group in my parish. One parishioner I spoke to said he was moving; Dalston was too noisy and he had found a larger place in Enfield. He lived in the estate next door and we found much in common. The ‘hope’ part of ‘Hope and Rage’ was already working.

One evening the group took the 242 bus from Dalston to Homerton. When we set off the night time economy of Dalston was just getting started. Commuters were flowing out of its two stations. By the time we reached the far side of Hackney, the Nye Bevan estate, most passengers had already got off, and the road was poorly lit. The 242 bus is the only immediate transport.

For the session on ‘shopping’ Simon Jones, a Baptist minister and financial expert, told us about the small shops, barbers restaurants and businesses that have sprung up in the refugee camp at Calais. Whatever happens people always have a little money for a hair cut or a shave, preferably at a barber’s shop specific to their own ethnic origins.

That week we also read the Parable of the Talents, Matthew 25. We discussed how the common expectation is that even if you have just a little, you should put it to earning capital. How many feel good stories do we hear about people who have risen from humble beginnings. The parable ends, after ‘there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth,’ with:

‘to those who have
will be given more
and to those that have not,
even the little they have will be taken away.’

Nowhere has this prophecy been more fulfilled than in Hackney, in the housing crisis and in particular in the private rental market. More and more people have to rent privately, with no hope of a council house or owning their own home. Where rents remain unregulated, private landlords, and those who own property, can only get richer. Those on low wages lose a disproportionate amount of their income to the landlord, effectively buying his property for him. In addition they are in danger of losing their home through ‘no fault’ evictions. Their situation becomes precarious, leading to anxiety, stress and ill health, the ‘gnashing of teeth’.(2)

Rob Schellert believes social cleansing is already happening. In a place such as Hackney, which used to be one of the most diverse boroughs, it would be a ‘tragedy’ if through gentrification that diversity was lost. Both at my local church and Urban Table, the weekly soup kitchen, I meet elderly people who seem to have been abandoned. Twenty years ago perhaps, their families chose to leave the old Hackney, of drugs and gang violence, for somewhere leafier or somewhere more affordable. The ones left behind are the elderly, the sick or the very poor.

‘What little they had’, their community, is being taken away. As gentrification as we enjoy the advantages, we can easily lose sight of those who are losing out.

The conversations on domestic matters, shopping, transport, made me think long and hard. I felt resistant at times – who cares if I take a bike or catch a bus? But this in itself reminded me of my own responsibility, the times I have thoughtlessly taken more than my fair share. It’s so easy for us to enjoy the benefits, thank you very much, without considering our relations to others and our neighbours. Even Radio 4’s Money Box Live recently ran an item on how parents giving their grown-up children money contributes to rent hikes and therefore the housing crisis.

Living in a family or community, I grow to understand the pitfalls of taking more than my share. If I take too long in the shower, I’m stopping my son from getting ready for work. If I extend this to my own neighbourhood, my shower, the one I am taking too long in, is someone else’s shower, the one I am taking from the poor. My house is the one I am taking from the poor. I am like the rich young man in Mark 10, turning away disheartened.

Hope and Rage, Rob says, is about recognising how our actions, whether consciously or not, affect others around us. Together we grow in awareness of how we relate to our real neighbours through shopping, education, transport. We persevere in sharing our experiences, until we see there is no right or wrong answer. The group is a place of encouragement to commit to something, to try new habits.

Dorothy Day writes, ‘But maybe no one can be told about poverty; maybe they will have to experience it; Or maybe it is a grace which they must pray for. [..] I am convinced that it is the grace we most need in this age of crisis.’

1 Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton, Loaves and Fishes, Orbis Books, 1963
2 Rosie Walker and Samir Jeraj, The Rent Trap: how we fell into it and how we get out of it, Pluto Press, 2016

This article was first published in the London Catholic Worker newsletter and is produced with permission

A star fish, a lighthouse, a city and a submarine

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Last night, as Londoners, in 30 degrees of heat, began to dream of going to the beach, MPs voted 472 to 117 to continue renewing the Trident nuclear weapons system. Theresa May, our new prime minister, seemed almost to slap the dispatch box with glee, when she said yes, she would press the button. She has already written the letter we are told, by hand.

In Parliament Square, waiting for the vote, along with the sensible families who had brought beer and pizza, I had a vision of one of those drawings of the seaside you find in children’s books. In the drawing there’s everything you might find on the beach: seagull, starfish, lighthouse, boat, sailing boat, water-skis, below and above the water line. In my version I added the Vanguard nuclear submarine, everlastingly prowling around. As any child knows there’s only some of these things. The fish and starfish and crabs are invisible, unless they’re dead and get washed up by the surf. This submarine is also invisible but real enough.

The majority of MPs have voted that we must have Trdient, on constant invisible patrol beneath the sea, so we can be safe , so we can have a holiday, so we can keep ‘our way of life’. I wonder often if they really think that. The fact that SNP and Plaid Cymru don’t think this gives me much hope. I wonder, with all the other members of my family, what is the matter with all the MPs who seem to be afraid of the power that they have, of the possibility of real change. They prefer to keep on with the absurd, even though the rest of us don’t need any military experts, lawyers or faith leaders to tell us that Trident is useless, illegal and immoral.

Highly respected activists and politicians spoke out on the podium last night, as they have been doing for years and years, including my own MP for Hackney North, Diane Abbott. But the BBC showed in its report a choir singing terribly. Anti Trident activists are woolly, nutty people who can’t sing it seemed to be saying. Those who voted for the motion tell us that to get rid of them would be foolish. It is playing politics with people’s livelihoods. No one ever asks what kind of a livelihood is it that prepares for mass destruction.

I read some of the comments the day before the vote. Our Trident submarines they seem to be saying, under the hash tag #Trident, are patrolling night and day, keeping us safe night and day. Out there beyond the starfish and the light house.

No one ever says what kind of a beach holiday it is that calls for mass destruction. There’s nothing like a day on the beach watching the huge waves crashing in from across the Atlantic to remind us how connected we all are, that the same sea, where we paddle our sunburnt toes, stretches out to the West, joining together all the countries. The same sea is hiding the nuclear submarine that we have to pay for.

The nuclear arsenal is necessary, we hear, in case someone, some city, threatens us. But which city no one knows. Mercifully, Theresa May has no idea which city. But we do know that it would be a city, here, on this planet, in this world. And we do know this is the only world we have.