This is an opinion column.

“The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’”

--Matthew 25:40

I don’t like the word “least”.

Biblically, I get it. As a Christian, I embrace it with my whole heart.

I still don’t like it.

Because I truly believe we’re all the same—none better, nor worse, than another.

Some of us were just born lucky. To parents who knew the pathway to success and possessed the means—whether time, money or a whole lot of prayer—to invest in us, to pour into us an appreciation for education, hard work, resilience, and faith.

They gave us the blueprint for success and the tools with which to build.

Some of us were not so fortunate. We were born instead into circumstances where few (if anyone) had the blueprint, into circumstances that did not instill in us the attributes of success others had ingrained into our consciousness from birth.

Circumstances all but void of hope.

Between now and, oh, 2024, the Southtown public housing development that has rested on the edge of Birmingham’s core since 1940 will be no more. At least not as we currently know it.

That’s a good thing.

The model upon which it was earnestly built—let’s make all poor people live in one place, disincentive the family structure and all but construct walls of hopelessness around them—has long been deemed a bust. It creates incubators for generational poverty and crime, places where people, where children live, breathe and endure traumas the rest of us cannot fathom.

As Birmingham lurches (often two steps forward, one step back) forward, striving to be the newest beacon of the South, it must not forget its people.

Not any of them.

Especially our poor, our voiceless and powerless, our citizens long bulldozed in the name of progress and progressiveness, people historically trampled by the stampede—the land rush, in the vernacular used to describe the roots of my Oklahoma—of prospectors now seeking gold in downtown Birmingham.

Like those who filled the Southtown gymnasium on Thursday afternoon and heard Michael Lundy, head of the Housing Authority Birmingham Division and his team tell them that, in just about a year from now, they’ll be “relocated” to other areas of the city to make way for a new mixed-use, mixed-income development designed to be yet another jewel in the city’s redevelopment crown.

Michael Lundy, CEO of the Housing Authority Birmingham Division, addresses residents of Southtown and other stakeholders regarding the redevelopment of the public housing complex.

Tell them every effort will be made to ensure their children will remain in their same school districts.

Tell them that those who want to return to a revived “Southtown” (or whatever it is called; like many of the restored historical buildings downtown, the new development should inherit the name of its ghostly predecessor)—may be able to do so.

Though no one clarified—and, frankly, no one asked about it—that the time gap between the relocation of myriad residents and being able to return to brand spanking new digs will most likely be two years.

They listened. They asked questions. They wondered.

“Your best interest is in our hearts,” Lundy earnestly said.

The children, teens, young mothers and seasoned residents who filled that gym dream the same dreams as children, teens, young mothers and seasoned residents who hit the birth lottery.

Amid this critical transformation of now invaluable real estate, they deserve to be treated with a dignity any of us would expect.

They deserve to be valued.

Or our evolution towards being the city we want to be will be a charade unworthy even of the least of our expectations.

A voice for what’s right and wrong in Birmingham, Alabama, Roy’s column appears in The Birmingham News and AL.com, as well as in the Huntsville Times, the Mobile Register. Reach him at rjohnson@al.com and follow him at twitter.com/roysj