Faith-based gentrification in Washington Heights/Inwood?

The origins of gentrification in Washington Heights/Inwood may have had more to do with drug lord Salvador Sabino’s conversion than we imagine.

Sabino’s life spans the invention of crack cocaine in the Bronx and Washington Heights through the Protestant revival among the Dominicans to the gentrification going on now. As much as any causal thread, the changes in life track the changes in Washington Heights/Inwood up to the present. So, the question is, what is gentrification and how did it happen?

Of course, many factors and actors have led to gentrification in upper Manhattan. However, the role of religion and morality has hardly ever been discussed. A preliminary closer look reveals that religious and moral changes preceded gentrification in Washington Heights/Inwood, then their importance receded as the creative class professionals and then the developers and wealthy came into the picture.

Now, gentrification is being followed by hyper-gentrification, i.e. the millionaires are being supplanted by the billionaires, that is moving up along the West Side of Manhattan. This phenomenon is reaching toward Washington Heights/Inwood in the form of a 20-story lux building on 181^st Street and Broadway.

The era of wealthy and super-wealthy gentrifiers shifts the life-style from that of the creative professionals to the lux life. The whole of Manhattan may become The Luxury City as proclaimed by Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Possibly, the lux life will end with its destruction by the displaced and devalued masses.

We asked several millennial gentrifiers about the reasons for their move into one block in Washington Heights. The area formerly was a pretty rough, drug area but now is relatively pacific. One is a graduate from medical school and now works as a medical professional at a local hospital. He chose Washington Heights as his home for the simple reason that it was the closest to the workplaces of him and his roommate.

He doesn’t know of the area’s past and only sees it as a suburbanite would see home choices based on closeness to work and good schools. He is not conscious that he is altering the neighborhood dynamics for the poor and working class. We are almost past the time that people were conscious that they were gentrifying an area.

The beginnings of gentrification

There are three major explanations for the origins of current gentrifications. One explanation is that after a period of dis-investment and dropping property values in an area, real estate interests develop it as an area of new investment to attract wealthier settlers. Neil Smith places the cause of gentrification at the point where the land in a city area becomes priced significantly below the prices of the land if it were redeveloped for higher rents. He calls this the “rent-gap” theory.

Some argue that an area starts to gentrify because the younger members of the “creative class” (artists, designers, and the like) are priced out of one area and move to find lower rental prices along the edges of sketchy neighborhoods. As their presence causes the area to gain more “cool” factor, people with more money move there to catch some of the pixie dust. Pretty soon, the wealthy drive up the rents so that the young “creative class” has to move to the next neighborhood to gentrify. In the late 1980s and 1990s, there was some movement of artists and musicians and even middle-class families into the more upscale western sections of northern Washington Heights (called Hudson Heights by some). Since 2010, this process in Washington Heights/Inwood certainly has become visible.

However, antedating all of these gentrifying moments in Washington Heights/Inwood lays the religious and moral origins of gentrification. Neither the wealthy nor the young creative class were going to move into a neighborhood where the likelihood of being robbed or murdered was pretty high. So, the question of the origins of gentrification has a lot to do with the reasons for the drop in crime rate across New York City.

Between 1960 and 1975, the murder rate in New York City increased four times to 22 murders per 100,000. Major crimes like violent assault and robbery skyrocketed. Drug-related crime peaked with the widespread use of cocaine. These bad trends continued to increase into the early 1990s. The New York Police Department rated Washington Heights the #1 precinct in the city for cocaine consumption in 1990.

Crime and religion

The crime rates started to significantly drop after 1993. Multiple reasons have been advanced for this change, but the most overlooked reasons are the religious and moral changes that were taking place.

Unfortunately, for years, there was little attention to the effects of religion on crime rates. As a 2019 scholarly review concluded, “Religion has rarely been incorporated into major theories of crime and criminological research.” However, new research is beginning to fill this omission. Criminologist Sung Joon Jang says that an overview of the current research shows that “a majority of studies tend to confirm significant negative associations between religion and crime and drug use.” For Washington Heights/Inwood, there doesn’t seem to be any research on the impact of changing religious conditions on crime rates, but the anecdotal evidence is still remarkable.

The era of the cross and the switchblade

A glimmer of the religious change started showing in the late 1950s. Washington Heights was already rife with gangs. One of the most infamous, terrible incidents in Washington Heights history was the brutal gang murder of Michael Farmer, a 15-years old polio victim who was the slow one associated with a mostly White gang called The Jesters. A country pastor named David Wilkinson read an article in Life magazine about the trial of the seven boys responsible for Farmer’s murder.

It wasn’t so much the text that arrested Wilkinson’s eye, but the pen drawing of one of the boys. “The artist had caught such a look of bewilderment and hatred and despair in his features…I began to cry,” the pastor wrote in his book The Cross and the Switchblade. He felt called by God to help the kids. As he traveled into New York City and through Washington Heights down Broadway, he had a line from a Biblical poem in his mind, “They that sow in tears, shall reap in joy.” (Psalm 126:5)

Wilkinson’s moment of compassion for the kids of Washington Heights drew him to the city streets. Thousands more would come, particularly in the late 1970s.

The era of church growth

Starting in the mid-1970s, the number of churches in Washington Heights/Inwood started to increase. This reflected a widespread religious searching and conversions. In Washington Heights/Inwood, the evidence of this change could be seen by the new storefront Pentecostal and evangelical churches. At the same time, there were immigrant groups that were providing many of the new members for these churches and also replenishing the congregations of the Roman Catholic Churches, particularly those that emphasized the more emotionally intense religiosity associated with the Catholic Charismatic movement.

Religious congregations in Washington Heights/Inwood were natural restraints to street crime and agitators for better policing. Further, some gang leaders actually became converted, brought their associates with them, and started new churches. Older established churches promoted social services and safe streets efforts.

A drug lord changes his path

At age fourteen in 1971, Salvador Sabino started his criminal career in Washington Heights. Soon, he was giving and receiving bullets. Being smart and ruthless, he was able to take over seventeen “points” in the Heights cocaine trade, sucking up about 200,000 a week. By 1978, he had attracted the intense attention of the police, was caught, and served the first of three prison sentences.

Sabino was born in 1957 in Ingenio Angelina San Pedro de Macoris of the Dominican Republic. In 1970 at age thirteen, he came with his parents to Washington Heights. But his father was absent from most of his life, and the young Sabino gravitated to the older boys who controlled the drug trade in his neighborhood. In 1986 he was in prison for the third time.

He lined up three witches to use their power to get him out of jail and protect his property. He asked his mother to bring him a book of spells. Instead, she brought the Bible, but Sabino was very wary of the book. “What disappointment!”

Sabino wanted to reject it, but growing up he had learned that this book must be respected. So, Sabino made it a good-luck item in his cell, covering it with a glass of water, a banana, and a piece of bread on the side. An apple sat on top of the open Bible. Of course, this became his excuse to not read it, and Sabino thought that its power would be tamed and used.

Until one day, Sabino recalls in his autobiography Two Ways, he began to read. And read and read.

One friend warned, “Be careful, old Salva…Don’t go mad!”

The Word of God began to enter my life.” In such a situation, some prisoners worried that their friend was going to become one of those “jumping monkey Pentecostals.” He prayed a challenge to a God that he wasn’t really sure existed. At home of course, his mother was praying.

“One morning at five-thirty, I heard a voice saying, ‘Salvador!’ …At first I thought I was hearing voices as a result of drug abuse and poor sleep.”
For two years, Sabino read the Bible and prayed. He started to act as a pastor to other prisoners. Several of his old gang also became believers. Just before he was released, he met a Christian woman who was coming to prison to minister. He came to admire her and the feeling became mutual. When he got of prison, the two committed to not be “rebels in the heavenly vision,” a reference to an incident in the early church recorded in Acts 26:19.

The two got married and started doing street ministry in the Bronx and a Bible study in their apartment. This eventually grew into a church which twelve of his former gang leaders joined. Today, Heavenly Vision Christian Center has branches in Washington Heights/Inwood, the Bronx, other parts of the city, New Jersey, and overseas. Thousands have joined up with these churches, including many who were formerly gang members. In fact, the phenomenon of a gang leader becoming a church leader was not uncommon in Washington Heights/Inwood. At the very least, the population of criminals was reduced. Further, the ex-gang members went out onto the streets to counter the influence of gang life on the youth.

Immigrant morality

Another factor that was particularly important in Washington Heights was the vast increase in the number of immigrants settling in the neighborhood. Though the disruption of a large number of strangers allows criminals to hide their disorderly activities, the immigrants in general commit crimes at a very low rate. In Washington Heights/Inwood, the immigrants often came with strong religious and moral convictions or soon absorbed them through conversions.

As the churches grew, they pushed the city to clean-up its police department and to be more effective in bringing peace onto the streets. The faith-based and other organizations could create momentum for change, but they needed institutional help to sustain it. This came in the form of better policing and wiser strategies of social service provision.

Political morality

A moral change was taking place in city government. City liberalism had become associated with compassion without responsibility. The irresponsible liberals excused crime, particularly petty crime, as a result of poverty. They often argued that the police and courts should be lenient. They wanted lenient discipline in the schools. A result was a rising disorder on the streets and felony crimes. A few liberals, like Mayor Edward Koch, got mugged and shifted their moral outlook to a liberalism that joined compassionate social services with less lenient policing. Further, in order to do better policing, the deep corruption of the police in Washington Heights/Inwood and other areas had to be uprooted. Koch and his police commissioner Benjamin Ward started many of the reforms.

Their efforts were followed in 1993 by the “broken windows” or “quality of life” policing of Mayor Rudolph Guiliani and Commissioner William Bratton. This sense of street law and order had resonance with their Catholic upbringing. The general idea was that widespread street level disorder created a sense of lawlessness that attracted and provided cover for criminals. If you eliminate the life-style misdemeanors such as panhandling and public urination, then the crooks tend to stay away and are easier to catch if they do come. Crucially, the first step was eliminating corrupt, brutal, and inefficient policing. The police department also started to collect detailed, accurate crime reports into computerized databases that allowed for patterns to be quickly discovered on which large policing resources could be brought to bear. Then, each precinct commander was responsible to address each pattern quickly.

All together, the neighborhood and church efforts, immigration, the reform in criminal justice, and more apt social services made for a sweeping religiously-rooted, morally tinged change in Washington Heights/Inwood streets. This lead to more peace on the streets — then gentrifiers felt safe to arrive. More artists or wealthy people did not kick off this change. They benefited from the religious-moral revolution, and then their presence has sustained this law-and-order change up today.*

There are still many questions about the role of religion and morality in gentrification. Was the increased presence of new religious people really big enough to effect significant change in the crime rates? If so, how did this happen? Directly through the conversion of criminals to good citizens or indirectly through cultural and political changes? How do you measure the promotion of delayed-gratification in favor of future benefits which seems to be a crucial factor in the role of religion in poorer areas of the city? What is the interaction of the disciplined work ethic of immigrants and their religious beliefs? Does gentrification provoke anger among the religious or tempt them to materialism, which may undermine their cultural strengths? Do the beneficiaries of gentrification owe anything to the religious revolutionaries?

*I want to acknowledge the well-researched book Crossing Broadway. Washington Heights and the Promise of New York City (2015) by Robert W. Snyder. I found his book very helpful to check my reporting since the 1980s in Washington Heights/Inwood.