Justice
The Gospel of De-Gentrification
A church in Minneapolis is making a scripture-centered fight against displacement the core of its neighborhood mission.
A few Sundays ago, at the first weekly service of New City Church in Minneapolis, the Bible wasn’t the only book Rev. Tyler Sit used to preach his sermon. The other text was How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood.
Peter Moskowitz’s book, which was published in March, takes readers into cities such as New York and San Francisco, where low-income residents of the inner city have been displaced by mostly white middle- and upper-class people moving back into urban areas. It’s a creeping reality for Minneapolis, too, including the southern neighborhood of Powderhorn, where New City Church assembles, as well as Central and Phillips, two other neighborhoods that the church has singled out to serve.