Thanks. It’s a pet peeve of mine. You see a lot of it here in New York City even though we have a large black population. The white liberals all live in very white neighborhoods. And if you can afford to live in those neighborhoods you can afford to live in the hood but none of them do.
Oh yes some do. What would be the motivation for them to do that? It is gentrification, which eventually displaces the poor who can no longer afford to live in those neighborhoods. Hundreds of NYC-area neighborhoods are exclusive or "super-gentrified," while others are at risk. Among the neighborhoods in New York that have been gentrified are Tribeca, DUMBO and parts of the Upper East Side.
I'm not picking on New York. Gentrification is a problem for the poor everywhere. It is a big problem in the Portland Metro area where what used to be 'the hood' a close to downtown neighborhood in N.E. Portland has been gentrified, displacing many who have lived there for generations. Many of these people now live much further from downtown and the industrial areas where some of them work. So the people who can least afford it are spending more on transportation to their jobs and services which are often not available in these low income suburbs.
One solution is to for cities to require a certain amount of affordable housing in all neighborhoods. There are problems with this idea though. If the city sponsors large scale low income projects and they can find contractors willing to build them, they become hell holes (ghettos within the project). Mixed income housing doesn't often work because of high real estate values.
For all of time there have been the 'haves' and the 'have nots'. Those at the top of the ladder wish those on the bottom rungs would just disappear even though these are the folks who out of necessity accept the jobs those with money will not. We all wish there were easy answers, but they don't exist. If they did, everyone would live 'the good life'.