Bad Neighbors

There are new neighbors across the alley.  The kind that swear, make lewd comments towards women, don't care if their garbage overflows into the alley and into other's property, and who have a number of 10 minute visitors who always have someone waiting in the car with the car running.  We can hear the parents screaming at the kids and see the kids roaming the streets at all hours feasting on junk food and candy.  Our landlords have entered into an old fashioned feud with them after they were found jumping on the Landlord's trailer and subsequently banned from the abandoned lot they had made into a playground, which required police involvement to get them off the property.  In retribution for this banishing the children slashed about 10 paintings that the landlords had displayed in the alley.  Currently, the landlords have forbidden their children from playing with the "bad kids" and are trying to find a way to get them out of the neighborhood.  

Marta and I have befriended two of the children and have had them help us with our garden that is on the land that they were kicked out from.  They are definitely some rowdy kids but can be respectful and helpful.  At a recent neighborhood party we attended we were talking with the landlord and they were talking about how horrible the neighbors were and how they had found out that the owner of the property did not have a renting license and they were in danger of being evicted soon.  I made an empathetic statement regarding how horrible that would be for the family to be kicked out so soon and the landlord returned with the reply, "well it would be good for us!"  I did not say it at the time (I wish I would have) but in my head I was thinking that it probably isn't good for us in the grand scheme of things.  

Everyone seems to want bad neighbors out of THEIR neighborhood and few people actually want to take the time to love them and try to help them be better neighbors.  I wonder if it actually helps us to push out everyone in the neighborhood who is an inconvenience or who have issues and leave ourselves with people who look just like us and don't require anything from us.  It may "help" us in the short run, but robs us of opportunities to grow and become children of God, bringers of peace and wholeness.

I agree that the landlord of these neighbors could be considered a slum lord- a landlord who is never present and never cares for their properties, but slumlords have a purpose in this society.  They provide housing for people who otherwise wouldn't be able to find it due to past evictions, felonies, or inability to speak english.  Otherwise these people would end up on the streets.  The (understandable) problem is that nobody wants to be near a slumlord's property because of the trouble that it brings.  But if no one takes the stand to invest in these people, there will never be any change and their cycles of poverty and issues will continue.