I Got Your Urban Village Right here......

as the wealthy and young displace the diversity of the urban core, inevitably, the urban core shall become as bland as the strip mall/suburbs....
In an article in The New Republic, Trading Places by Alan Ehrenhalt,
The demographic inversion of the American city.
Post Date Wednesday, August 13, 2008.........
the amazing shift of the poor and colored out of the cities, and the influx of wealthy young and white into the cities.....makes American cities resemble what urban planners have taxed us to do.....that is.....what Jane wanted us to do....

"We are not witnessing the abandonment of the suburbs or a movement of millions of people back to the city all at once. But we are living at a moment in which the massive outward migration of the affluent that characterized the second half of the twentieth century is coming to an end. For several decades now, cities in the United States have wished for a "24/7" downtown, a place where people live as well as work, and keep the streets busy, interesting, and safe at all times of day. This is what urbanist Jane Jacobs preached in the 1960s, and it has long since become the accepted goal of urban planners."

except I doubt the Utopian Nirvana of intelligent and lively and diverse and artistic and soul-uplifting will really happen.....because if there is one thing that the wealthy want it is.....nothing much but everything clean and sanitized.....and you love Julie Anderson because she doesn't like anyone or anything that isn't clean and white/wealthy.....(Asians are honorary white people)

from the comment section of this online article :
"As an artist who grew up in manhattan in the 50's and still manages to live there I am astonished as to how wrong headed and self congratulatory this article is. What made New York as culturally rich as it was, was that it was possible to live in manhattan if you were poor. It was also possible to partake fully in the culture of NY because the cost was not prohibitive. It is what made NY a magnet for artists of all kinds. This is no longer the case. There are no longer cheap spaces for artists and musicians. A kind of economic pacification has taken place, and the result is the economically well off stare at each other in upscale restaurants and the city is on the way to becoming a cultural vacant lot."
That is, of course, my fear. As a creative artistic person, I don't get my inspiration from condos or the dwellers therein....nor do I get inspiration from the "urban" dweller....I get what I need from it all....the mountains, the sky, the tall buildings, the people...all of them blend into a mix that is part magic, part serendipity, part sanity, part crazy. It's UNPLANNED.

"Much of what Jacobs loved and wrote about will not reappear: The era of the mom-and-pop grocer, the shoemaker, and the candy store has ended for good. We live in a big-box, big-chain century. But I think the youthful urban elites of the twenty-first-century are looking in some sense for the things Jacobs valued, whether they have heard of her or not. They are drawn to the densely packed urban life that they saw on television and found vastly more interesting than the cul-de-sac world they grew up in."

well, Goodness won't prevail if this happens:

from the Biz Buzz article about KWA buying the share of The Olympus Hotel downtown:

"Pritchard told the council committee her association would conduct a thorough review of each tenant's credit and rental histories, inspect each unit and interview tenants to determine which ones can stay and which ones will be evicted.

"If we have to terminate some tenants, there’s a process for that," she said."

Termination for not being white and wealthy. I don't like the sound of that!