Community advocates have long seen gentrification as evil. Though studies consistently show that little displacement occurs in most improving low-income areas, the notion of gentrification as anti-poor and anti-minority has persisted and, over the last decade, intensified. Activists and academics, often amplified by local media, have expanded the purported causes of gentrification to include such things as climate-change policies, efforts to spruce up parks, and bike-sharing initiatives, while denouncing as enablers of the process such dark agents as restaurant critics and hosts of television fix-it-up shows. Creeping gentrification is “the province of avocado toast–loving, espresso-swilling—and mostly white—millennials,” as one report expressed it. Gentrification has become a verbal bomb thrown in battles over the racial or ethnic makeup of neighborhoods, “a more pleasing name for white supremacy,” in Ta-Nehisi Coates’s words.

Some of these complaints might seem absurd, but when acted upon, their consequences can be disastrous. In poor neighborhoods, where lack of investment and depopulation have led to a decline in housing stock, anti-gentrification forces resist zoning changes that would unleash developers to construct lower-cost multifamily residential buildings and propose new twists on historic-preservation districts, aimed at freezing the racial or ethnic “character” of neighborhoods. Nonprofits and governments buy up land to keep it from being improved. Almost all change is rejected.

What such practices assuredly will not do is improve the prospects of residents in struggling neighborhoods. Things can’t stay the same and get better. The gentrification debate implies a choice.

[Is ‘gentrification’ a problem? It can be and the author tends to discount it here, but Malanga’s right that it gets outweighed by the corrosive nature of urban decay. These days, though, we’re likely to see little gentrification anyway in areas blighted by crime that results from law-enforcement and prosecutorial policies fueled by other Academia-driven grievances. You can’t even invest as Malanga urges without solving that problem first. — Ed]