One of the most interesting ironies of the modern day is that where liberals tend to congregate in great numbers, blacks disappear.

You only have to look at Chapel Hill to see this phenomenon in action. While professing to be for the downtrodden, embracing multiculturalism, and making all the right noises about affordable housing, liberal bastions eventually begin to look like a day in the neighborhood of The Brady Bunch.

Thomas Sowell has a great column about this strange effect as it is manifested in San Francisco and its surrounding lefty counties:

Blacks are being forced out of San Francisco, and out of other communities on the San Francisco peninsula, by high housing prices.

At one time, housing prices in San Francisco were much like housing prices elsewhere in the country. But the building restrictions– and outright bans– resulting from the political crusades of environmentalist zealots sent housing prices skyrocketing in San Francisco, San Jose and most of the communities in between. Housing prices in these communities soared to about three times the national average.

The black population in three adjacent counties on the San Francisco peninsula is just under 3 percent of the total population in the 39 communities in those counties.

Sowell’s concern is that Republicans aren’t making the argument against the liberal and Democratic policies that disadvantage black people. Liberals, of course, are fine with that. As a friend once commented to me, “To liberals in Chapel Hill, Durham is affordable housing.” I guess that’s what people in San Francisco think of Oakland.