From the NYT:

The End of Black Harlem

Newcomers say gentrification is about wealth, not race. But that’s a distinction without a difference.

By MICHAEL HENRY ADAMS MAY 27, 2016 … There is something about black neighborhoods, or at least poor black neighborhoods, that seem to make them irresistible to gentrification. Just look at U Street in Washington or Tremé in New Orleans. “Everywhere I travel in the U.S. and even in Brixton, in London, a place as culturally vibrant as Harlem, wherever people of color live, we and the landmarks that embody our presence, unprotected, piece by piece, are being replaced,” said Valerie Jo Bradley, who helped found the preservation advocacy group Save Harlem Now!

Well, not exactly. A more accurate way of looking at it is that blacks acquired a number of close-in neighborhoods — Harlem, most of Washington DC, the south lakefront of Chicago, a huge swathe of Los Angeles between the beach and downtown, etc. — and then held onto them longer than would have happened if they had been less violent. Black crime allowed blacks to afford otherwise desirable urban neighborhoods for longer than less violent groups, who got economically or ethnically cleansed from their neighborhoods with little muss or fuss.

Slowly, especially in New York City, crime has been brought under better control, which means no part of Manhattan will stay a slum.

The Obama Administration, going back to its Chicago roots, has close financial ties to urban real estate interests, such as the Pritzkers. The very first conversation between the young Obama and Rev. Jeremiah Wright in Dreams from My Fathers: A Story of Race and Inheritance is a discussion of the spiritual adviser’s secretary’s plan to move to the suburbs and why Wright opposes that. (Wright eventually retired to a 10,000 sq. ft. house in a golf course development in a highly white suburb).

So, the Obama Administration has paid particular attention to greasing the skids under urban blacks so they won’t face any resistance to their abandoning all the potentially valuable real estate they occupy and moving to less fashionable locations. For example, the Obama Administration has been at war with Dubuque, Iowa over its resistance to Chicago plans to relocate Chicago’s poor, violent blacks to Dubuque. Obviously, the liberal Democrats running Chicago are liberal Democrats so they can’t be racist in their desire to pawn their troublesome Chicago blacks off on the small city losers of Dubuque, who are no doubt vicious racists, just look at them.

The general term chosen by the Obama Administration for this strategy of dumping the hot potato of poor blacks on the rest of the country to create trillions in new value for urban real estate interests is Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing. I suspect this awkward term was chosen to dissuade talk radio hosts from taking it up because it’s hard to say without sounding like Daffy Duck.

My position on all this is that poor blacks will always be a hot potato that powerful interests are plotting to dump on less well-connected Americans. That’s always going to happen, but at least we can have fair arguments about the machinations if we all lay our cards on the table and publicly criticize each other in open debates.