A Convenient Definition of "Blight"

The Pastor’s Page

Every time I drive downtown and see the fences around City Center, I get mad.
It’s going to be demolished. It’s called “urban blight.” Something else, a park, I think, is going to be put in its place.
Meanwhile, blighted houses in poor neighborhoods are allowed to remain. They become havens for drug traffic, eyesores for the neighborhood, a danger to children, bringing down property values.
The city cannot just up and tear them down. There are laws, you know. And it seems that the absentee landowners know those laws, and do just enough to keep their property from being torn down, but they do nothing to improve that property and thus improve the quality of life for the people who live in the neighborhood.
But the City Center … ah, there’s blight that cannot be allowed to remain!
We don’t have enough money to take care of our neighborhoods, put more parks in our neighborhoods for our children, so they will have something to do other than run the streets. Budgetary concerns make it impossible for more recreation centers to be built. In fact, many of them are being shut down.
But the City Center … there’s enough money to make a park downtown. Or something.
This week there was also a report that several central Ohio hospitals are going to be building new facilities. There’s going to be a new heart hospital somewhere, and another cancer hospital.
The current structures just will not do.
Of course, there are no plans to build a new hospital on the city’s South Side. The people there are too poor. Someone said in a radio interview that the only patients a hospital on the South Side would have would be those on Medicaid, Medicare, or “no pays.”
“A hospital just cannot be sustained like that,” he said.
So, the new hospitals will be built, driving up health care costs, even while the debate about health care reform is going on. Oh yes, we the taxpayers will be paying for all this new construction – going on in the north side of the city.
What about the people on the South Side?
The poor people are always the ones least served. Profit-seeking ventures do not care a hoot about the “least of these,” nor do they treat their needs as “holy,” as Obery Hendricks says in his book, “The Politics of Jesus.” Poor people are taxed; you bet they had better pay their taxes “like everyone else.” But they are not cared for “like everyone else.”
I would not object to the City Center being torn down if I felt a passion on the part of city lawmakers to really deal with the real neighborhood blight in our city. I would not object to a lovely park in downtown Columbus if I saw the city trying to build more parks and recreation centers where there are kids standing around with little or nothing to do. It would seem …right … then. There would be some equity, and some real concern for the masses of people who help keep this city moving.
As it is, though, there is no equity. In the Book of Jeremiah in the Hebrew scriptures, it says in Chapter 8 beginning at verse 20: “The harvest is past, the summer has ended, and are not saved. Since my people are crushed, I am crushed. I mourn and horror grips me. Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there? Why then is there no healing for the wound of my people?”
There is no healing because we the people are far from God with our hearts. Otherwise, with the “blighted” City Center being torn down, some of these horrible properties would be coming down, too. With a passion.
Have a good week.