Dear Pastors & Community Leaders,
My recent experience in Jacksonville, Fl... has me pondering as I visited my father's homeland for the first time since having
him honored at Arlington National Cemetery. (Thanks to San Francisco Bayview Newspaper for sharing the article).
It grieved me deeply as I came across this abandoned house in "Historic Floradale" that was last lived in by his widow Cora Bradley Hall and the son of of Jacksonville's first Black police officer, George Bradley...He happened to be my father Sp5 Wyley Wright Jr.'s cousin, who bought this house up the street on Wolcott Avenue from the house my father and mother helped buy for my father's mother and grandmother.
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Home of George Bradley,
Jacksonville's first Black police officer in Jacksonville, Fl. |
I was told by one of the young neighbors that all the people that lived there had died. The house according to the posting was found abandoned November 2014.
As I drove around North Jacksonville, I saw too many vacant lots and abandoned houses.
These homes below were not abandoned but they show a potential vision of the church or nonprofit organizations buying homes like these, one property at a time and tying in social service programs with the homes. They are large enough to be used to make a home for foster youth, veterans, elders along with adding offices for social services. How efficient would it be for an elder to be able to walk to one of the other rooms and talk to a senior services advisor? The potential is only limited by our thoughts.
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The potential for repurposing homes that are abandoned to their grandeur like these homes with the added benefit of social services added, can eliminate the waste of resources and land. Public Private partnerships can cause communities that have fallen by the wayside to be reinvigorated.
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What I saw was in Jacksonville, Florida, but there are indicators from across the nation that former Black neighborhoods, if not gentrified already, are languishing and are fallow ground in which there is need for investment.
Is it not possible for churches to combine efforts to buy these homes possibly with federal community block and church fundraising? Churches combining in neighborhoods can increase empowerment. Simple Action Plan:
1) Repurpose the homes for low income church members to rent and possibly buy in the future
2) Refurbish the homes with the labor of young Black men, the re-entry population, and/or the underemployed
3) For those homes not abandoned but close to foreclosure, help families stay in their homes via renegotiated loans or purchase them to re-sell to the families at a more reasonable mortgage rate
I think its important to engage banks to use the money set aside for minority communities via the
Community ReInvestment Act created after redlining cases. There does not appear to be any accountability for how those funds are used. From what I have seen in the community, it appears banks have used the CRA funds to buy brochures for seminars promoting the banks at churches and organizations without releasing money to make a real difference in those communities. After the bank seminars at local churches on improving credit and promotion of bank services, the attendees still are left without access to capital to make changes in their neighborhoods.
Keep in mind, Redlining has not gone away.
Factor in the financial robbery of the foreclosure travesty that blamed Black and Brown people for the financial molestation of their communities and we can get a glimpse of why the financial system is going to fail in one day due to God's judgment as Revelation predicts.
The Internet is full of old and new articles from
NY Times,
NY Times,
Huffington Post,
WSJ,
Washington Post,
CBS Money Watch etc. chronicling the foreclosure injustices. Films like
99 Homes,
The Big Short,
The Wolf of Wall Street,
The Promised Land, show the financial and moral decadence that fueled the housing crisis, yet with destroyed families, failed marriages, sickness and death in the wake of evil financial plans that were orchestrated in corporations, many victims still blame themselves. The general public seems to have no clue as to what happened or there would be uprisings in the streets.
As a note especially for Christian churches that believe what the Holy Bible says of "end times" in Revelation that THOSE WHO DO NOT HAVE THE MARK OF THE BEAST WILL NOT BE ABLE TO BUY OR SALE... it would benefit us to take action now to create economic engines within and among churches to diminish the temptation to sell our souls for a loaf of bread or a place to stay.
Using the power of its members, be it their bank accounts and or knowledge, a church should access and organize economically to help its members and ultimately its neighbors, cities, states, nation and world, working from the inside out. For the churches that are part of major Church conventions or assemblies etc. surely there is enough power to at least begin pilot programs to demonstrate the possibility.
Synagogues, mosques, churches, religions organizations should evaluate their power and be the force in the world they were intended to be.
When one thinks of all of the many sororities, fraternities, lodges etc. surely their power could be used more effectively internally and externally.
I believe we can do better than this.
