Policy expert: Destroying a Neighborhood To Save It

Anti-gentrification activists in Boyle Heights, a heavily Latino district of Los Angeles, have greeted liberal artists and hipsters “with racial taunts, vandalism, boycotts and mask-wearing demonstrators,” notes Kay Hymowitz at City Journal, even forcing them to move their activities elsewhere. But it’s a pyrrhic victory, “hindering the vitalization of a longstruggling neighborhood and its ambitious new entrepreneurs.” Indeed, “for the anti-gentrification protesters, art galleries are by definition capitalist enterprises, and thus enemies of ‘the community.’ ” Yes, “gentrification is bound up with artists in complicated ways.” But “in their Maoquoting zeal, the activists are thwarting not just their interloping co-revolutionaries, but the neighbors whom they say that they want to protect.”