A few years back, we started looking for our first house. We wanted a place that matched our values and worked for our family. We realized there weren’t many neighborhoods in the Birmingham area that had the mix of location, affordability, diversity, and amenities we wanted. Many of our friends moved to the suburbs, mainly for better schools and easy access to stores and restaurants. Earlier in our marriage, we lived as inner-city missionaries and later started a church in a nearby public housing community. We were ready for something different, but we didn’t want to leave city life behind.
After months of looking at houses our realtor suggested, praying, and talking about where we wanted to live, we spent a long day visiting several homes on the same side of town. That’s when we ended up in a neighborhood we had driven through before and pictured ourselves living in. When we visited, there weren’t many homes for sale because demand was high.
We eventually moved into that neighborhood and found a place close to my old office and our current church. Our neighborhood is really an enclave—one of the last middle-class Black neighborhoods in Birmingham. While it has mostly remained the same, the surrounding areas have changed a lot over the past 15 years. What used to be a racially diverse part of town is now more racially uniform, but with a mix of incomes.
Over the years, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how neighborhoods and communities grow, shift, improve, and decline. I’ve tried to answer the question of how people and places can thrive, whether by planting churches, working in city government, or starting a charter school. This question comes from my own family’s story of leaving home for better opportunities and from my belief that every person has inherent worth.
That’s why I’m on a journey in my reading and study to answer the question: what does it mean for people in places to thrive?
There Goes The Neighborhood
In their book, There Goes the Neighborhood: Racial, Ethnic, and Class Tensions in Four Chicago Neighborhoods and Their Meaning for America, the authors William Julius Wilson and Richard P. Taub examine both place and people in the context of neighborhoods. They do this by utilizing economist Albert Hirschman’s theory of exit, voice, and loyalty. They describe this theory as “a theory…that is relevant to understanding ethnic changes in neighborhoods. Hirschman argues that when people become dissatisfied with changes in their surroundings, they can exit—move or withdraw from further participation—or exercise their voice; ‘any attempt to change, rather than to escape from’, undesirable situations.”
Looking at Chicago in the late 1900s and early 2000s, they explored issues I would face years later, and that many of us deal with now. What should we do about our communities and the people who live in them? They concluded that “neighborhoods in urban America, especially in large metropolitan areas like Chicago, are likely to remain divided, racially and culturally.” We see this every day in the schools we pick for our kids, the groups we join, and the homes we buy. It also shows up in the news, on social media, and in our churches. We seem more separated from each other than ever, and that isolation is making us worse off.
These days, I spend most of my time helping develop leaders and thinking about what makes cities better or worse places to live. My mentor asked me a question this year that I’m still working through: What are you building that will last beyond your lifetime? Not just for the next few years, but for decades to come. Here’s what I’ve realized so far: you can’t create a healthy neighborhood just by running programs. You have to shape people who are willing to stay, because real change happens when people stick around.
When people are shaped by a place, they become loyal to it, and that loyalty gives them the courage to speak up.
Exit
I have described the way we found our house as a search. It was also an exit. We’ve had a few of those over the years, choosing to invest our lives in different geographical and physical spaces. Exit isn’t always bad. Sometimes, it’s an honest conclusion to a difficult situation.
The first exit I was part of, I did not choose. In the nineties, my parents moved us — my mom, my dad, my sister, and me — out of Birmingham for better schools and a place where we felt safe. They were not alone. The city was losing something close to a thousand students a year to the surrounding systems. That is not a statistic to me; it’s my story. It’s shaped so much of my life up until this point. That is a choice made at a kitchen table by a mother and father who loved their family, and I was one of the children it was made for. A decision made in love that still felt uprooting.
I grieved this loss as a child, but as an adult, I have never once thought my parents were wrong.
The second exit, I chose. We planted a church in a public housing community and pastored it for several years, living two miles up the road the whole time from a neighborhood I loved. We closed it in 2019, started attending a church on another side of town, and bought our first house near that church; three reasonable decisions that added up to a departure.
That’s what makes this hard to write about, honestly. Leaving isn’t usually done out of malice. It’s made up of countless reasonable choices by people who want better schools for their kids, a shorter drive to work, a yard, or just a good night’s sleep. Most people don’t set out to weaken a neighborhood. That’s why it’s so hard to stop; you can’t blame someone for wanting to protect their child.
Wilson and Taub found that as Chicago’s neighborhoods changed, white residents most often responded to the arrival of Black and Hispanic families by leaving. This is the history of Birmingham and its steep population decline over the last 50-plus years.
Wilson also focused on something we talk about less often. When middle-class Black families move away, they don’t just take their income with them. They also take the support systems: the churches, businesses, associations, and adults who looked out for everyone’s kids. What’s left behind isn’t just economically poorer. It’s less organized and has difficulty organizing, advocating, and holding itself together.
I have not stopped asking what it would have taken to stay, but I understand why we left.
Voice
Hirschman’s point is that leaving and speaking up are opposites. When it’s easy to leave, people don’t stick around to argue for change. In a city like ours, leaving is always an option. There’s always a newer neighborhood a short drive away, a school with better stats, or a house with a bigger yard. Because there’s always somewhere else to go, communities slowly lose the people who might have spoken up, shown up at the local church, or joined the neighborhood school’s Parent-Teacher Association.
When I led Elevate Birmingham, we partnered with a congregation that had been a flagship Baptist church for decades. At its height, it had close to two thousand members, and more than 90% were white. By the time I met them, they were under two hundred. The neighborhood around them had changed, and most of the people who had built that church had responded to the change as people usually do: they left.
The pastor could have just managed the decline. Most churches in that situation either hold on, sell the building, merge, or close quietly. Instead, he opened the doors to ministries and community-serving organizations. Our offices moved in. A local Christian school joined the campus. A national ministry serving middle and high school students came, and other partners followed. We reached out to the neighborhood association and the schools.
Some of it was good, and some of it was bad. We had a conflict over how much of the ministries' space-rental expenses should be paid by the church; we debated space usage and who would clean which parts of the building. That wasn’t a failure of the model. I’ve learned that it is the model. Exit is cut and dry. Voice is a two-hour meeting about parking and building access— or a long road to selling a parking lot to support ministry and create a community asset
When you bring people with different ideas together, you get conflict before you get unity—and sometimes you only get conflict. If I could go back, I’d push for fewer business meetings and more time spent in prayer, so we could really understand each other. Still, a church that might have closed its doors is now a place where kids are educated and tutored after school. That happened because a group of people chose to invest in a neighborhood that had changed, even if it no longer looked like their congregation.
You cannot convene a neighborhood you just arrived in; you have no power or influence there. Voice requires standing, and standing requires time.
Loyalty
Hirschman’s third option is the one most people overlook. Loyalty isn’t just a feeling. It’s what keeps you around long enough to speak up instead of packing up. Loyalty is what keeps people, even when leaving would make sense, which sounds like the obvious happy ending, except Wilson and Taub will not let it be one.
The neighborhood in their study with the strongest social ties—lots of networks, active groups, and high participation, all things community developers in my line of work praise—used all that organization to keep outsiders away. They weren’t disorganized at all. In fact, they were very organized against their new neighbors.
We understand this type of loyalty, especially here in the South; it’s often rooted in organizations like the White Citizens Council of the 50s and 60s. The association that fights the mixed-income apartment complex. The church that will do anything for the neighborhood, except let the neighborhood join the church. Loyalty built the thing I am describing, and loyalty also built the wall around it.
So the question is not whether a place has loyalty. It is: loyal to whom?
Loyalty to a neighborhood’s past can become a wall, blinding people to necessary change. Loyalty to a neighborhood’s people can open doors.
That’s why I believe formation is the foundation, and everything else grows from our formation as people and institutions. You can build capacity in a year: hold meetings, make plans, raise money. But you can’t rush the process of shaping what people believe about who matters to them. That kind of conviction takes time, usually shaped by others, and it almost always takes longer than any grant cycle.
I’ve seen people like my friend Raquel Patterson, who serves as the executive director of Oak Tree Ministries, a ministry in the Marks Village Housing Community, choose to stay. She moved into the community; she’s brought people into her home. She’s built a strong organization and team, a mix of people from the neighborhood and those passionate about long-term investing. She’s used the Christian Community Development Association to train her team and build a network of like-minded leaders as she continues her work in placemaking and shaping others with the gospel. Raquel’s example is rooted in the belief that communities change through our consistent, skilled presence. Her team is modeling what it means to create space in communities for people’s voices to be amplified and loyalty to be exemplified.
I asked earlier what it would have taken for us to stay. I still do not have a clean answer. Sometimes staying in disinvested neighborhoods is trying and exhausting. Dr. John Perkins calls relocations into these neighborhoods essential to seeing them transform, and many people have followed his lead into places we’d rather not be in, but come to call home. There are no simple answers, but Dr. Perkins calls us to intentionally invest among the disinvested, or, as Howard Thurman calls them, the disinherited.
What I do know is that asking the question is part of the work. So many neighborhoods in this country are losing the people who could hold them together, one reasonable decision at a time. Programs alone won’t fix this problem. Only people who have been shaped by their community and who choose to stay for reasons deeper than logic can make a difference.
The series No One Is Coming is a collection of essays from my writing in this season of life. It speaks to how we often wait for some metaphorical figure to step in and make all things better. The title comes from Geoffrey Canada, who said that when he learned Superman wasn't real, he cried because no one was coming with enough power to save them. In this series, I will write about what I am reading. Essays will range widely. I invite you on this journey, and if something resonates with you, would you do two things for me? Would you leave me a comment or send me an email (dannyb@actjustlylovemercy.org) and let me know, and would you act on your convictions, inspirations, and encouragements? Stop waiting for someone to rescue you or your community and join in the work of restoration, renewal, and revitalization.
As someone who has had the privilege to work in communities who are considered “disinvested” or “disinherited” I am grateful to hear of the work you have engaged in. The part about convening in a neighborhood you just arrived is a staple that should not be overlooked and yet is unfortunately glossed over by ministers and providers of the community alike. Meeting people where they are and providing them guidance and being a vessel of change or progression for them will inevitably take time. There’s a lot to glean from this article and I appreciate you taking the time to share with us. Many blessings!
Thank you Danny for always communicating such difficult topics with grace, nuance & truth. You gave voice to the struggles & conversations we’re constantly having as a team.
I feel I have the honor of continuing in the work that you guys & so many saints before us began. I’m grateful for your friendship & fellow love for our city!