José  Humphreys, part Black, part White Puerto Rican, is one of those unsung neighborhood heroes that inspire awe and a little bit of shame among us lesser heroic types.

He grew up in the housing projects of the Lower East Side at a time that hearing gunshots, a car screeching away on Avenue D, and followed by high-pitched screams were what passed for memory-making. He observes in his new book, Seeing Jesus in East Harlem, “LES in the 1980s was ripe with opportunities for bodily harm…” Yet, there was an insurgence by the locals against all the negativity.

His neighborhood had his little Assembly of God church on the corner of 6th Street and Avenue C, personal generosities, and barbecues and block parties with guest liturgical specialists, otherwise known as “DJs.” His Mom also insisted on not moving because “Manhattan es mi isla.”

But gentrification has cutoff this pleasant history along with the bad. There are a few murals left by Chico, the local graffiti artist, who once was a member of the church youth group. Humphreys remembers Chico’s “MAD skills with a spray can…For  some people, graffiti is considered just another form of vandalism. But for many of us, graffiti  served as our hood hieroglyphic, telling the world, ‘look and see’ because we’re here.” Even now Humphreys muses, “What if church liturgy were somehow connected to our social reality this way?” But Chico has left to live in exile in Florida (last that I heard).

Humphreys left too for school, then seminary, and a church plant in East Harlem called Metro Hope. He is part of the gentrifying wave into the area though he and his wife have done everything they could to join the “other side,” the non-gentrified. He and his little church have been putting up a heroic resistance, but it seems that he might as well be making a last stand at The Alamo.

Let me give the upbeat of the church’s heroism:

one lay leader mobilized faith-based groups to lobby for poverty relief policies;

another left behind a high income law partner track to defend girls kidnapped by Muslim extremists in Nigeria;

raised awareness and money for the victims of an earthquake in Haiti;

rallied for Dreamers and other unregistered immigrants;

establishment of a small community apartment called Hope House;

planted a community garden for sharing produce;

backed with money and people anti-sex trafficking and anti-slavery efforts;

raised support for First Spanish Church after it was destroyed by the East Harlem gas explosion; and

an intense marketing of local businesses through prayer, “buy local cash mobs” of church    people, and putting on street festivals that featured local businesses.

Wow, you think! And you are right. Jose and Mayra Humphreys and their crew are local heroes.

He has put his finger on a key need in New York City: working and middle class businesses that can provide a way up for the neighborhood poor. Right now, one of the biggest things keeping the poor down is that the ladder of success from working poor to working class to middle class to wealthy is broken. At the top we have an expanding class of uber-wealthy who have sucked the vitality from the middle and non-union working classes. The potentates don’t mind looking good by funding social services for the poor. But how can the poor ever rise to working and middle classes here in NYC and create a healthy spectrum of the classes? If a poor person is to rise above being poor, often there are only two choices:  get a union job; or leave the city. So, Metro Hope has done everything that they can to rebuild the middle part of the ladder of upward mobility by supporting local businesses. But the buy-local campaign seems to have had only a modest success.

“New York City has solidified its standing as the most unequal city in America,” historian Fred Siegel wrote, “Twenty-five percent of New York was middle-class in 1970, according to a Brookings Institution study. By 2008, that figure had dropped to sixteen percent, and the numbers have only plunged further since the financial crisis, with virtually all the new jobs in the city’s hourglass economy coming at either the high end or the low.”

New York City has 500,000-1,000,000 fewer people in the middle and working class than it should, compared to the income distributions in other cities. The gentrifying edge of the uber-wealthy is slaughtering hope for the poor. Zoe Rosenberg for the real estate website Curbed observes how this plays out in Humphreys’ neighborhood, “The data highlights the city’s decline of middle-class neighborhoods, and the growth of its upper-income neighborhoods. Manhattan saw major growth of its higher-income neighborhoods between 1990 and 2015. Nearly half of Manhattanites live in upper-income neighborhoods as of 2015…. 29 percent of Manhattan residents lived in middle-income areas in 1990, but by 2015 the number had dropped to 18 percent.”

Humphreys and his group should be commended for their heroic battle for the downtrodden, which increasingly in NYC includes the working, lower middle, and small business classes.  However, his strategy was partly based on a misreading of a study about which he heard on National Public Radio.

The pastor uses a preliminary study of the spatial buying patterns of customers in Spain to justify his buy-local campaign to eliminate income disparities caused by gentrification. The authors had cautioned that their study was very preliminary and that none of the group was an expert at income inequality research. Humphreys read their study as claiming that income disparities could be significantly lessened if local people would just make 5% more purchases at neighborhood businesses. The research actually found something different than that. They found that if people from other, presumably wealthier neighborhoods, crossed over to the poor neighborhood to buy more stuff, then income would be transferred to the poor neighborhoods.

Humphreys’ strategy of having the local poor buying from local businesses, even if the goods are more expensive, actually may hurt the poor while having only a modest effect on the fortunes of local businesses (one of the stores which Humphreys mentions the church helping subsequently went out of business).

If a poor local person buys a locally designed, made and sold T-shirt for $50.00, the poor person has cut in half the amount of wardrobe that he can buy if he went a few blocks away at the big box store selling such T-shirts for $25.00. The poor person ends up having fewer clothes in the closet on behalf of a business that isn’t going to be able employ him anyway, even if it survives. (There is some circulation of the money within the neighborhood that offsets some of the deficit. And the buy-local campaign is not over and may still bear more fruit.)

The strategy works best if you can bring people who have more money from other neighborhoods to buy in the poor neighborhood. Humphreys could try running advertising for the stores in his neighborhood with his personal endorsement as a pastor in the bulletins of nearby churches in wealthier neighborhoods or in faith-friendly media like A Journey through NYC religions.

This is a church with a big heart and strong faith. May they continue the good fight!

 

Metro Hope Church, Sunday at 11:15 AM, 2037 5th Avenue  

 

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