Local Church School Cashes In on Gentrification

Seems like the music clubs and coffee shops aren't the only places that are losing out in the relentless march towards the upper-middle-class homogenization of Manahattan. The Catholic Church is angling to get a piece of the gentrification action as well.

Lourdes Velasquez has seen it all in East Harlem. In the old days, it was a neighborhood for poor and working-class families. In the bad days, it was beset by guns and drugs. And now? Doormen. New high-rise buildings. Higher prices at the local supermarket. Young couples pushing strollers that cost more than a month’s rent in yet-to-be-renovated buildings.

While she resented these gentrifiers who “discovered” the only neighborhood she has known for all of her 35 years, she also tried to ensure that her daughter, Chrystal, would be able to deal with the changes. She sent the girl to St. Francis de Sales School on East 97th Street off Lexington Avenue, paying $3,000 a year to give her the kind of Catholic education that enabled previous generations of working-class children to become professionals.

...Ms. Velasquez and the other parents of almost 200 students in the school’s eight grades were abruptly told in early March that the school would close in June. But officials at the Archdiocese of New York, as well as other parents and clergy familiar with recent events, said they expected that the school would reopen in a year, possibly as a more expensive private academy or preschool.

What is amazing about this story is not that the church would abandon the low-income parishoners who supported it through the "bad" days (they are a business, after all), but that the local pastor would be so up front about it:

A little over a year ago, Father Muzzin said as much in the Sunday bulletin distributed at Mass. In it, he described how the school — which parents said served primarily black and Latino students — needed to attract a greater “variety of people” from the area.

“Some parents have to wake up to the realization that they cannot afford Catholic Education,” he wrote. “Period.”

The pastor’s message became clearer a few lines later: “I see the day in the not distant future when it will become the school of choice of all the Catholic parents in the neighborhood who now send their children to prestigious and pricey private schools,” he wrote. “Why spend $25,000 when you can get the same thing for much, much less?”

By "much less" he apparently means about $12,000 a year, or quadruple the current tuition. While the corrupting influence of wealth on the church is a centuries-old story, it's striking that at this point they don't even feel the need to pay lip service to the needs or wants of the non-wealthy.