I didn\u2019t notice any trouble until he called the police\u2013I was too distracted by the sunlight. Our kitchen windows are six feet tall, and on sunny afternoons like this one, the yellow walls gleamed, the dirty dishes on the counter shone. Thump, thud. It was still early spring, and the windows were closed, muffling the clanging, banging, and thumping coming from across the street.<\/p>\n
I looked out. Two men were loading our former neighbor\u2019s belongings into a pickup truck. Her house had sat vacant for a year after she moved into a senior building, now her appliances were heading out the door. \u201cI tried to talk to them,\u201d my housemate said, \u201cand they blew me off. The cops are on their way.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cOh,\u201d I said, \u201coh, I see.\u201d He walked out to the porch to see what would happen, and I sank down on the kitchen stool, staring at the floor. Calling the police was complicated. We couldn\u2019t just sit by and watch while our neighbor\u2019s house was emptied, but they would know who called\u2013the white people, again\u2013and what if the men were rude to the officers too? \u201cNo one get shot, no one get shot,\u201d I prayed as I peeked out the window.<\/p>\n
No one got shot. The police arrived, they\u00a0talked, the next door neighbor came out, and soon everyone was laughing amiably. As the cops drove away, embarrassment settled in, hard. \u201cI hate this,\u201d I thought, \u201cWhy are we always the ones to overreact? It\u2019s the middle of the day, of course they weren\u2019t doing anything wrong.\u201d My housemate came back in and noticed my discomfort.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ll take care of it,\u201d he said, and disappeared into the basement, returning a moment later with two bottles of beer. Clink, clank, he marched out the door. Peeking out the window again, I watched him approach the men, somewhat in awe at his nerve. He was talking, they were talking, he handed them the beer, and he walked back to our house. \u201cWhew,\u201d he shut the door, \u201cTurned out they were family of a neighbor, everything\u2019s alright. Glad I apologized.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThey took the beer,\u201d I said, still a little surprised. \u201cYeah,\u201d he shrugged, grinning, \u201cSometimes a beer can turn an enemy into a friend. They\u2019re good guys, just a little surly at first.\u201d<\/p>\n
And that was that. Two beers\u2013the solution for all your cross-cultural tensions.<\/p>\n
*****<\/p>\n
With a big word like gentrification, it\u2019s tempting to just talk about it at a macro-level. Government, development, public policy\u2013all of this matters. But there is also the everyday reality of living in close quarters with people who are not \u2018like me,\u2019 and trying to get along.<\/p>\n
This can be exhausting, and, like deciding whether to call the cops, more complicated than I ever imagined. But I suspect that mixed-income communities (or any communities) succeed or fail, ultimately, at the micro-level. In other words, can the people who live next door to one another learn to be neighbors?<\/p>\n
On our block are middle-class working families\u2013healthcare workers, retired city bus drivers, preschool teachers\u2013and families who subsist on minimum wage jobs, food stamps, and Medicaid. The black folks (about three-quarters of our block) have generally lived in our neighborhood their whole lives and have family scattered about the community; the white folks are relative newcomers and have family scattered about the country.<\/p>\n
And there are times when living together can be stressful and bumpy. There are misunderstandings and mistakes; there are awkward moments. Soon after I moved in, a well-meaning man said to me, \u201cDon\u2019t you worry, dear, my mother and I are glad that you\u2019re here. We\u2019re not like everyone else.\u201d<\/p>\n
And I thought, \u201cIt\u2019s a good thing that \u2018everyone else\u2019 is too polite to say!\u201d<\/p>\n
However, there are also moments when I think that living where I live, and learning to get along with people who are not \u2018like me\u2019, is perhaps one of the richest experiences of my life.<\/p>\n
One of my favorite neighbors is a grandmother who is working toward her GED while raising her grandkids. We go to church together, and her youngest loves to chase our chickens around the backyard. One day I gave her a ride to the bus stop, and as we were chatting about kids, weather, and leaking chimneys, I suddenly realized how much I needed this woman to be my neighbor.<\/p>\n
There is a lot of talk, a lot of research, about how mixed-income communities benefit the poor\u2013there can be increased employment opportunities, for example, and their kids tend to have higher social mobility\u2013but what struck me in that moment, and has stayed with me since, is the sense of how much the rich (or at least the relatively rich) benefit from living near the poor.<\/p>\n
I give my neighbor a ride, but she gives me insight I could get no other way. I watch her sacrifice for her grandkids while taking one GED class at a time, I watch her struggle, and I watch her pray. I watch her maintain faith and a sense of humor in the midst of situations that might just do me in.<\/p>\n
She (and others) also give me financial perspective. When asked why they moved to our neighborhood, one family said, \u201cWe didn\u2019t want our kids to think that it was normal to have a Rolex.\u201d Having neighbors who work full time and yet struggle to buy fresh vegetables tempers my materialism. It also reminds me to be grateful at the farmer\u2019s market. It\u2019s not a guilt trip; it\u2019s a reality adjustment.<\/p>\n
Finally, speaking of reality, there is just something about living with people who freely admit they don\u2019t have it all together. My neighbors have kids in jail, various addictions, and teenage pregnancies. While we\u2019re all messed up in one way or another, the poor tend to wear their wounds on the outside. When I see this, and then see these same people embraced in spite of their (sometimes still oozing) wounds, something inside of me is also set free.<\/p>\n
All this doesn\u2019t happen in one trip to the bus stop, but over a decade or so, it begins to sink in: I need my neighbor because in the moments when I am her chauffeur, she is my teacher. This is a small step, but isn\u2019t this the way that neighborhoods are built?<\/p>\n
One ride,<\/p>\n
one conversation,<\/p>\n
one adjustment of perspective,<\/p>\n
one mistake and one apology,<\/p>\n
two beers at a time.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n