I live in a neighborhood that has rapidly gentrified. Ten years ago there were few stores, and most those stores had a bare bones practical appeal. Now there is are several strips of appealing small boutique type stores and many excellent restaurants, everything is small entrepreneur nothing corporate, mostly very hip. Neighborhoods that were primarily black are now majority white.

I also tend bar at a local watering hole. My bar makes no appeal to any specific demographic, the service is nothing special, drinks are cheap and it's a generally comfortable place for anyone to kickback and have a drink. It's given me the chance to talk to many people who grew up in the neighborhood and see how they feel about the changes. Many black with long time roots in the community miss some of the businesses that catered to blacks. Most of those fondly remembered businesses went away long before the whites came, so generally the gentrifiers aren't seen as responsible for their loss.

Everyone that owns a home or has a parent that owns a home seems pretty happy about the direction the neighborhood has taken. I've heard more than one story of people parents selling their home that was valued under 100k 10 years ago selling for over 300-400k and retiring in the south for cheaper living with better weather.

Blacks own 2 of the 3 nicest homes on my block, Blacks own their homes on my block, while Whites both rent and own, with White occupied housing being the less desirable (with one exception, but that exception being some strange hippie commune or something, we have never quite determined the nature of their arrangement, nice place lots of nice people, with a large garden and barn type animals). The street people in my neighborhood are mostly Black, but you see some Mexicans and Whites. Not saying homeless, but these are people who live a pretty rough life, scavenging what they can to make a bit of money. If you didn't know them, you would probably be a bit worried to see them rumbling around on your street, and you should be worried about a few of the them, but most are just trying to get by. They are more decent and honest then you could really hope for considering how close to the bone they live. In that most of them are black I think they do more to propagate outsiders perception of our neighborhood and the blacks that live here than all the black families that are in their houses enjoying their families, gardens hobbies ect. I still occasionally meet people who thing my neighborhood is a ghetto (these are people who don't have a clue about what a ghetto looks like) and I think they draw this conclusion from the black street people.

The other thing that makes people think my neighborhood is bad is the crime. There isn't a lot of crime, but there is an occasional murder spree here. I remember summers where 4-5 people were slain in a week. This seems pretty shocking, but it really isn't. If you aren't a drug dealer or in a domestic conflict with an armed lover you are almost 100% safe from violent crime. There was only one murders in my memory that didn't involve at least one of those two factors. I don't really know where to put this fact, but all the murders are Black on Black, most are done to and by young men.

Don't really know why I typed all this, but I've thought a lot about these issues during the ten years or so that I"ve spent living and working in this neighborhood.