No matter what you do, modern liberals will tell you youre    wrong.  
    For decades, liberals complained that American society is    segregated because rich, white people dont want to live in    ethnically mixed neighborhoods. Sometimes, liberals had a    point.
    From the 1930s to 1960s, as rich white people moved into New    York City, urban planner Robert Moses got city bureaucrats to    condemn and destroy busy black neighborhoods. The city called    the neighborhoods blighted and moved many of the poor into    rent-subsidized apartment complexes called projects. Many    quickly became slums.
    Now times have changed. Some rich, white people want to move    into poorer, non-white neighborhoods because they like diversity (and cheaper real estate).    So today the newcomers are attacked by liberals because they    cause gentrification.
    Movie director Spike Lee, who lives in Brooklyn, said    gentrifiers behave almost like Columbus and kill off the    Native Americans. Of course, the new gentrifiers dont    actually kill anyone, but because their arrival often leads to    rising real estate values, critics complain that they drive    poor people out of the neighborhood.
    Two women in Brooklyn got so angry about it, they pulled out a    gun, forced two white people out of an apartment and moved in    (they were later arrested).  
    Columbia urban planning professor Stacey Sutton calls    gentrification a manifestation of inequality that may    fundamentally alter the culture and character of the    neighborhood in ways that hurt the poor.
    Yet her own school did something worse. Columbia colluded with    politicians to use eminent domain law to take pieces of the Harlem neighborhood    that surrounds Columbia. In court, the school argued that it    had the right to take neighbors land because it would benefit    West Harlem.
    Who owns the land is something that ought to be decided not by    government but by free people making their own decisions about    where they wish to live. When gentrification happens that way,    spontaneously, price rises are often accompanied by drops in    crime, new job opportunities and better connections to the rest    of the culture. What the left calls gentrification is often    called improvement by people who live there.
    Another Columbia urban planning professor, Lance Freeman, found    to his surprise that gentrification didnt even mean    significant displacement of the previous population. In his    book There Goes the Hood, Freeman writes, poor residents    and those without a college education were actually less likely    to move if they resided in gentrifying    neighborhoods.
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John Stossel Hey, liberals, stop fighting gentrification