Luxury condominiums, organic ice cream stores, cafes that serve soy lattes and chocolate shops that offer samples from Ecuador and Madagascar are rapidly replacing 99-cent stores, bodegas and rent-controlled apartments in the Mission District, this city’s working-class Latino neighborhood.

The New York Times published an article about mostly White dotcommers moving into a Hispanic neighborhood of San Francisco called the Mission District. But nowhere in this article did the Times ever use the word "diversity." This is puzzling, because in every other article where they talk about adding more Blacks or Hispanics to a white population, they always celebrate that as the merits of diversity. But not this time:

The food-snobby NY Times loves to write about soy lattes, as one of the favorite pretentious drinks of the left-wing cultural elite. But in this article soy lattes take on an unaccustomed role, as the drink of the evil rich white elite.

As San Francisco has become the preferred bedroom community for Silicon Valley, the Mission, with its urban edginess, has become the hottest location. Close to the center of the city, it has historically been home to Mexican and Central American immigrants whose large families live in small apartments in narrow Victorians and older buildings. Taquerias, bakeries, bars and auto mechanic shops line the streets where Spanish is spoken. The local color is still here: Splashy murals, many with political themes, provide open-air art on numerous buildings. But the housing prices have risen well beyond the reach of the average artist: Studio apartments in the Mission are listed on Zillow, the real estate site, for $2,700 a month, and one-bedrooms for $3,800. Another complaint is that the influx of newcomers is bleaching out the Latino culture that drew them here.

The Latino culture is being "bleached out." Have you ever read an article in the New York Times that called Latinos moving into a White neighborhood as the "browning out" of the area?

The Times tries to frame it in economic terms; the poor Hispanics pushed out by the rich White people. But when does the Times ever complain about poor Hispanics moving into housing in a White neighborhood and affecting property values? Never.

Effectively, "diversity" has become a codeword for "let's have fewer white people". That's why this article never once talked about how white people are "diversifying" this Hispanic neighborhood. Since this was a situation of increasing numbers of white people rather than a reduction, the joys of diversity have been replaced by the evils of gentrification.

By the way, you will be pleased to know that the Mission District still has a lot of diversity: of crime, that is.

A=Assaults, S=Sexual offenses, V=Car theft, B=Burglary, R=Robbery, the triangle that looks like a biohazard symbol is a registered rapist or child molester, and the multibox symbols means there are too many crimes in that area to be listed individually.

(Map by Crimereports.com)

According to the San Francisco Human Waste Map, there is also a lot of human waste there from people who do not pooper scoop themselves, though whether this is diverse poop, from multiple ethnic groups, is hard to tell; with all the newcomers coming in, perhaps the people droppings will come from a more diverse group of citizens, so the bottom of peoples' shoes can be a virtual United Nations of excrement.

I wish I were a young dotcommer because I know if I were, that is exactly the kind of neighborhood I would want to live in.

This article was produced by NewsMachete.com, the conservative news site.

Thomas Lifson adds: I know the Mission very well, and must note that extreme variability of the neighborhood. Dolores Street, which runs next to large Mission Park and Mission Dolores, the first European structure in the city, is highly gentrified, with multimillion dollar houses. The streets between Dolores and Valenica are also very upscale. The crime map leaves this area out (to the left of the map) and the excrement map is concentrated elsewhere.

I have never encountered excrement in the upscale area, and I am there often. Valencia Street is Hipster Central, with many of the best restaurants in the city. But go a block or two closer to the Bay and hit Mission Street, and you are in Mexico. It is one of the starkest contrasts I have ever encountered in this country.

What is happening now is that developers are moving into Mission Street, and that is where the conflict is likely to escalate. There has already been one major apartment development that has been killed by neighborhood protestors, for no apparent reason other than it would house people wealthier than the poor immigrant community.

For what is worth, the Hispanic residents were not the first people to settle the Mission. They moved in and replaced Jewish, Irish, and other groups who were the original residents. To claim that Hispanics have the right to live in the Mission forever is to ignore the pioneer residents of the neighborhood.

A similar phenomenon is at work in the Fillmore District, to the north of the Mission. Many people bemoan the gentrification that has driven many blacks out of that district. But black settlement in the Fillmore dates from World War II. Prior to that, it was largely Japanese families. Of course, they were put in concentration camps by liberal icons Governor Earl Warren and President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Claims that blacks should somehow dominate the Fillmore ignore this history.

Urban neighborhoods change over time. Nobody owns a neighborhood forever.