We’ve been on that [Plymouth Church] site for eighty years, and we were right across the street [from the old nursing home], and it was sitting empty for two years. We had this infant foundation with the skill set to do something. The timing was right. Every time you came back to the question if we were doing the right thing, it sure felt like we were.
Wanting to understand the perspectives of the many groups that played a role in the Lydia battle, the director of the Plymouth Foundation connected me with two women who were active members of the board at the time of the conflict. The first, Olivia, I met at a Dunn Brothers Coffee down the street from the Foundation’s office, itself a five minute walk from Lydia. She was a smartly dressed, energetic, middle-aged woman who was eager to tell me her thoughts. She grew up in the Twin Cities, lived in Minneapolis, and had been a member of the Plymouth church for thirty-five years. In the past she had done some non-profit work on poverty in Asia, and during this time that she was
I kept thinking back to here [Minneapolis]. We’ve got homeless people here, we have homeless people in India. I think there are great similarities. And part of my frustration about what we do in this city in this community is that we really do have a lot of resources here. I think there is no excuse for homelessness in Minneapolis. There is, there are excuses for places in like Cambodia, there were years of war, we don’t have that happening [here]. We live in a wealthy
community. I had heard that the Foundation had just barely got started, and I called and said I’m interested. How can I help?
The second board member was Kendra, who had been a member of the church for ten years and lived in a wealthy neighborhood in SouthWest Minneapolis. Both Olivia and Kendra expressed to me a great deal of pride in Lydia, because of what their organization collectively had accomplished (but while they did a great deal of volunteer work, neither ever bragged to me about anything they personally did). For example, Olivia was proud of how Lydia provided “safe, clean, and dignified” homes to people in desperate need of them, while Kendra was really happy that Lydia was “a really safe place for the tenants where they feel cared about.”
What I took away from my interactions with people from the Plymouth
Foundation and the Plymouth Church, was their strong pride in social justice activism, their faith in people, and their value of trying hard to understand those different from themselves. While their viewpoints are thought-provoking in and of themselves, this study of the Lydia battle focusses heavily on understanding the arguments of the
opponents, and I provide the proponents’ views not as a counterpoint, but to provide
context for our understanding of the creation of the opposition, and its effects on both the neighborhood and debates over where to locate the homeless and disabled. I will show that the crusades of both the proponents and opponents are about bringing justice to the people of the area, but where the opponents express their mission primarily in the form of deeply held values and faith, the opponents do so primarily in the form of deeply thought- out social theory.
Earlier in the chapter we met a protester who told of the “negative energy” at the large intersection a block away from Lydia; in contrast, Kendra talked much about the “positive energy that you can feel” at Lydia – “It’s so powerful.” She told me a story I had already heard from another supporter, about a Lydia resident who had “reunited with
his daughter and grandchildren” at a Lydia anniversary party. “They’re sitting on his lap eating ice cream and cake. It’s just heartwarming to see that … they are re-connecting with their family and friends.” Once Lydia had been running for a time, Olivia became quite proud of its stability. She had expected frequent turnover of residents, but found that there were residents who were living there longer term, and they began to create “self-sufficient” lives for themselves. Residents began “working part-time for pay, many of them began volunteering in the community… they organized a food drive which the church helped with and made food baskets for people ... They plant gardens.” Olivia was expressing not only that the individual residents became stable, but that Lydia itself was becoming a stabilizing force on the neighborhood. “We got notes from people in the Steven’s Square neighborhood, who said I’m just surprised and in awe with what
happened with Lydia … The building is beautiful, it’s a stable part of the neighborhood.” Likewise, Kendra was also proud of their accomplishments. The
church … created this real community. We have residents out there who are serving in gardens in the neighborhood, serving on the safety patrol, several who have been able to move on and get their own apartments, some who may stay there for decades. But it really, there’s something, everybody says when they go in there, the energy is good. So my goal would be for us to create housing for people in lower incomes where there is really a sense of safety, and outreach into the community, where they feel like they are part of the community they live in. Another supporter claimed that Lydia would also contribute to fighting crime because instead an abandoned building, it would be full of people who would put more eyes and ears on the street, ready to call the police when something was amiss. And in the words of the county commissioner for the area, "I have trouble saying something is wrong with supportive-housing. I think it is an asset to the community" (Russell 3/25/2002).xxvi The head minister at Plymouth exploited his opponents’ language of “investment” by saying, “The unambiguous bottom line is that 40 formerly homeless men and women will be able to close their doors and say, ‘This is mine. I belong here’”(Russell 5/29/03).
In expressing this delight in what they had helped wrought, Olivia and Kendra were making a larger argument for how much Lydia’s stability was contributing to the neighborhood, but while for the opponents the theory of contribution was the footing of their opposition, for the supporters I sensed that it was more of an after the fact rebuttal to
the criticism they received. Olivia was eager to convince me that the residents were not doing anything destructive to themselves or the neighborhood, pointing out that all must be free of drugs and alcohol. The theory imbedded in their arguments was that the residents would not contribute to the street drug-dealing industry, but also would lead even-keeled, productive lives that would help the area. While Olivia was not insincere, she was piggy-backing upon her opponents’ theory of community contribution; she had internalized it out of political necessity. Her main concern seemed to be for the residents themselves, and for the society as a whole.
However, that is not to say that those at the Foundation didn’t think about the neighborhood residents, it is just then when they did, they (mostly) thought about different ones than Citizens did, and thought about them in a (somewhat) different way. Kendra, feeling like she did want to do in neighborhoods what the neighborhood
organizations wanted, but feeling frustrated that in this case what they wanted conflicted with her principles, told me, “There is just no way that a church with a social justice view of the world is going to come in and say oh yes … let’s come in and gentrify the
neighborhood. I mean, no!” In trying to understand the actors in this contest, and put that understanding down on paper, I thought a lot about what social justice meant, trying to connect it with the actions of those supporting subsidized housing in the neighborhood vs. those not. But without question, the protesters would consider themselves as fighting for social justice, and both the sides were advocating for the poor and marginalized, just like both felt they were following the rule of law, creating stability, contributing to the neighborhood, and were stakeholders in the neighborhood. So what is the difference between them?
In a sense much of this dissertation is about answering that question in order to get at the nature of multicultural, community activism, but at this spot in the dissertation I am showing their similarities, in order to complicate the meaning of the tropes used by the actors (e.g. stability, contribution, stakeholders). So while Citizens primarily makes appeals to the rights of long-term, community-involved residents, property owners and business owners, and the Foundation to the homeless and disabled, and while Citizens argued for the fate of the drug addicted already in supportive housing in the area, and the
Foundation for the fate of the drug addicted not yet housed, “justice” of the “societal” kind was on the hearts and tongues of everyone involved. However, like liberals and conservatives in America, they had different theories of how to enhance the prospects of the poor and in-need. In the end I realized that while not a platitude, the term “social justice” had no self-explanatory meaning, it was just that by convention people today happen to use it in the context of activists more on the left (an even more arbitrary title).xxvii
This is why I found it very interesting to read a newsletter of The Whittier Neighbors, who consider themselves the true progressives and leftists in the
neighborhood, which seemed to consciously avoid issues of justice and civil rights. The Neighbors saw themselves as sharing much with the Plymouth Foundation, while nothing with Citizens except for a zip code, but I found that they did share with them a propensity to strategically employ the trope of neighborhood “stability.” At the July 2001 board meeting of the Whittier Neighbors, it voted unanimously to support the Lydia project, and their next newsletter urged readers to express their support for Lydia to their county commissioner and city council member. The newsletter argued that “tenants will be required to engage in productive activity.”
But nowhere in the two paragraphs about Lydia does it argue for Lydia on the basis that it will be adept at helping people in need, or that supporting the homeless is something that should be done in its own right (because people deserve a nice place to live). The newsletter builds its argument on the grounds that Lydia will not hurt the neighborhood; the tenants will be incredibly regulated and kept in order. The facility will “be highly managed” and each tenant will have to sign a lease agreeing to strict “behavior standards.” These standards will be enforced by a round-the-clock team of specialized experts such as “finance managers … and housekeepers.”
The newsletter portrays tenants as having the potential to contribute to society because they will all receive job training and some will even “be employed full-time.” And says this in such a way, that it appears to assume that everyone knows that working forty hours each week is the ultimate in being a fully functioning individual member of
society. While activities like volunteering, going to school, caring for children, and studying your faith are all valued and are also done full-time, these pursuits are not considered as ends in and of themselves; it is the attainment and maintenance of a “full- time” job that completes a life (the only deed that needs doing after this is to retire and/or die). “There are rumors in the neighborhood that this is going to be a shelter. This is NOT a shelter. This is permanent housing for our low-income neighbors.” Like “affordable housing” or “housing project,” “shelter” is perceived by the writers of the newsletter to be a nasty word. The reason it is made so explicit that it is not a shelter, is because shelters house people only temporarily, and this implies that the residents are not really neighbors. A neighbor has the connotation of the friendly homeowner next door who you chat with while he responsibly mows his lawn. A neighbor is someone you borrow a wrench from; meanwhile those in shelters do not have wrenches to loan, and may not trustworthy enough to loan one to. I attribute their use of the stability trope by the supporters of Lydia as something borrowed from their opponents.
Both Olivia and Kendra expressed a sophisticated sense of how their activism related to their faith, a sense that I found was based on the mutual exchange of diverse ideas. For Olivia,
One of the most compelling parts of my faith that is reinforced at Plymouth [Church] is that there isn’t one true faith, but that people experience spirituality in a myriad ways … There’s a motley assortment of people [at the church] … We question, we argue, get to know other religions … What we have in common, what we can learn from one another. When I spoke of the sermons this is one of the central themes as well as social justice … If there were anything about Plymouth is the most important to me is that, it is multiculturalism in a different, in a different way, with a focus on religion. It’s how do we learn from one another, what do we have to contribute to one another … In Plymouth for example there is absolutely no interest in proselytizing.
Or as Kendra put it, “some of the tenants [at Lydia] are much more likely to proselytize us than we to them.” Both were stressing that they belonged to a Christian church that respects others’ ways of believing so much that they did not try to convince others that their way was the right way.
Olivia’s pride in the church originated from her appreciation for the urban, progressive, and activist aspects of the church itself.
I’ve never not lived in a city, I couldn’t imagine not living in a city … I’m not a very active Sunday worshiper. I was Lutheran as a child and I was forced to go, you had to be bleeding or throwing up to not go. And I hated it. We made fun of it … Later I started having children, and my husband and I hunted for a church where my children wouldn’t be tainted by the silliness I grew up with.
Unlike her parents’ church, the one of her choosing was a place where she could learn about others different from herself. However, what made the church a particularly special place for her was that everyone, together, was committed to the pursuit of trying to understand others. While I am sure that the inner-city diversity of the neighborhood within which it sat was a selling point for Olivia and others at the church, the
neighborhood’s diversity seemed to lack for her the quality that made the church special, its unity in diversity. Not only did was the neighborhood quarrelsome, but she saw many as just plain mean, stubborn, and ignorant.
Olivia seemed be invoking two different inter-related communities, the church (of which the Foundation was a part) and the wider world; the neighborhood around the church was the immediate part of this wider world. While she spoke of the church as a strong community of people mutually committed to such values as learning from others and social justice, the world beyond the church seemed often to lack these qualities. The world was a frustrating place full of people who deserved to be heard and respected, but often did not reciprocate in kind. It was not that the world was a nasty place, it just was not Plymouth. However, “part of our faith is that you contribute to making this a more just community, a more just world.” Olivia very much respected the Plymouth minister for his open-minded way of trying to change the world.
An amusing thing, our senior minister was mentored by a real liberal and ardent protester, when he heard about the [Lydia] protesters he said to the minister, you must be doing something right, that you’re stirring up controversy, but not intentionally. Listen and understand and keep plucking … Having been a protester myself as a younger woman, I understand the point of becoming highly visible, I mean, how are you going to make a point by not becoming highly visible … [However], we didn’t think they [the Lydia protesters] spoke for the community. We listened, we
acknowledged their frustration, but much of what they had to say we didn’t agree with … Some people from that group went out and covered the neighborhood, going
door to door to door, telling people that there was going to be a lot of black people coming in and de-stabilizing the neighborhood … We just didn’t agree it would destabilize the neighborhood.
This story about blacks had circulated among the Foundation and the church, and regardless of its veracity, it makes it easier to discount those who have been painted as outright racists.
The Foundation however did see itself as having made attempts to include neighborhood voices in their process. A year before the Foundation was formed, and three years before it bought the Lydia property, the church had created an Outreach and Vision Committee to examine how the church relates to the community. Even the name of the Plymouth Church Neighborhood Foundation made an attempt to cry out that this church did care about neighborhoods. Also, the head pastor lived in a modest house in Whittier, and had said that “while the tradition seemed to be for Plymouth's ministers to live elsewhere in the city, I felt it was time for us to show our commitment to this neighborhood by my living here” (Russell 11/5/2001). We see how the exact spot in which he lived, was a statement.
The great frustration and disappointment of Olivia came not from knowing that some fought against Lydia, but that see saw them doing it in a way that left little room for dialogue between differing ideas. When talking about the opponents’ perspective she told me,
I understand that concern, but when we would say to them we understand the concern but we want you to understand the path we’ve taken … It will be alcohol and drug free. We have a very reputable management company who will work with the people … And they just dug in, and they either didn’t trust us, or, I mean surely they didn’t trust us, but I think that it didn’t matter what we said. They don’t know us from anybody, and they weren’t open really to hearing.
In the face of Olivia’s self-perception as a fighter for social justice, a fair fighter, and one