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New York City is changing, and critics of development aren’t wrong when they say that many neighborhoods have changed more profoundly and more rapidly than ever before. In certain places, the accelerating rate of transformation has made long-term residents — and even relative newcomers — dizzy. What made this happen, and when will it stop, or at least slow down?

What extremists cast as a nefarious plot to steal the city from its rightful, largely -minority owners is in fact something far more salutary: The growing popularity and livability of New York City, among people of all races and backgrounds — a phenomenon that creates real economic pressures, but also tremendous opportunities.

One term that is often bandied about in discussions of housing, affordability and culture is “gentrification,” which in many circles is a synonym for “genocide.” Recall Spike Lee’s 2014 mostly -unprintable rant against white people who “just move into the neighborhood” (Fort Greene, where Lee grew up, though he was born in Georgia) and “bogart” the place like they discovered it, “like mother-effin’ Christopher Columbus.” Or consider the broad and positive reception of Jeremiah Moss’s new book “Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost its Soul,” based on his popular blog.

Moss, who painstakingly reports on the closing of every old-timey coffee shop or stationery store below 42nd St., presents in his book an intriguing history of the last hundred years of development and migration in New York City, and gets most — though not all — of it wrong. But his vision of New York — as a hollowed-out, suburbanized, plastic replica of its original self, which was intentionally made that way over decades of cunning on the part of savvy millionaires and racist urban planners — resonates with many people, including some, like Mayor de Blasio, who should know better.

Gentrification originally referred to working-class neighborhoods in 1960s London where well-off people, attracted by sound Victorian housing stock and the rough charm of mixing it up with one’s social inferiors, moved in, sometimes displacing the original residents.

But in discussing New York City, “gentrification” does not mean displacement in terms of class: When Spike Lee bought an Upper East Side mansion in 2006 for $16 million, and then put it on the market seven years later for double that, he wasn’t “gentrifying” anything, at least not the way most people use the term.

When Chinese investors pay in cash for Sunset Park properties, that isn’t thought of as gentrification, either, nor was it gentrification when Mexicans poured into Corona, or when West Africans moved into the Bronx and Harlem, though the demand for space drove rents up there too, and changed the local culture.

No, gentrification, in the context of New York City, means specifically and uniquely the movement of white people into areas where non-white people currently reside — and this movement is always presented as a problem.

lLeftist critics of New York City’s current vector of development believe that wealthy elites, in league with a federal government that has always been hostile to cities, have been working to destroy and disperse minority and working-class communities, in order to seize them on behalf of financial and real-estate interests.

This project was embraced by Ed Koch, expanded by Rudy Giuliani, and reached its apotheosis under Michael Bloomberg, who turned New York City into a “fantasyland of outrageous luxury” for a “privileged group of billionaires,” and “a living hell” for everyone else, according to acclaimed urbanist Alessandro Busà in “The Creative Destruction of New York City.” Moss calls the project a “master plan to take back the city from the poor, people of color, homosexuals, artists, socialists and other undesirables.”

The master plan was put allegedly put into effect as early as the 1910s, when African Americans from the South moved to northern industrial cities to work in factories. This Great Migration brought hundreds of thousands of black people to New York City, which was then a major manufacturing center. By 1950, almost a million New Yorkers — about 30% of the workforce — were employed in manufacturing.

In response to this boom, the “Elites,” writes Moss, “squeezed the working class, reducing the number of industrial jobs.” Black people, who previously lived alongside whites in semi-integrated neighborhoods such as Manhattan’s San Juan Hill, were forced into Harlem ghettoes.

The Regional Plan Association, unhappy with “blue-collar, multiethnic people taking up space,” began scheming in the 1920s to deindustrialize New York City in favor of high finance, which 95 years later has succeeded in populating Manhattan with “basic bros… looking like the preppy villains from a John Hughes movie,” while their girlfriends “vomit Jägermeister onto our doorsteps.”

This cartoonish encapsulation of the history of the decline of manufacturing