Interesting that on the same day the N&R runs Thomas Sowell’s column on the ‘redevelopment hoax’ comes news that news that blacks in the South “are shunning city life for the suburbs at the highest levels in decades, rapidly integrating large metropolitan areas that were historically divided between inner-city blacks and suburban whites.”
Still, I was a little confused by Sowell’s column. On the one hand, he defends private developers, stating they “would not even exist if there were not vastly larger numbers of people ready to buy or rent what they build.” And that seems to be the case with African-Americans in the South.
On the other hand, Sowell says inner city redevelopment “exports low-income people and imports high-income people— with no net addition or subtraction of either segment of the population in the country as a whole,” a process that often “takes the form of ethnic cleansing.”
Whatever the case, the bottom line remains the same —– inner city Smart Growth development is a liberal white elitist movement seeking a prefect world. I don’t know when they’re going to understand it’s just not the way people want to live.
