These "real-estate sharks" also consist of "people of color" So they're just as much to blame.
Of COURSE some of them are people of color. I never said there weren't. Hell, I've even MET some of them.
I was talking about why people have issues with whites coming into their neighborhoods. It has nothing to do with whites, like I said, but the TYPES of whites. In the past, whites who came to NYC came here precisely because they wanted to be part of something exotic and offbeat. They LOVED neighborhoods like Chinatown, Harlem, etc. They loved them so much that if places like this were under threat, they were always the first ones to fight for their preservation.
The whites that started coming post-9/11 are completely different. They not only look down on neighborhoods like that, they INVITE the type of gentrification and predatory real estate that destroys these areas. For example, they go to community board meetings attacking locals as NIMBYs. They lobby for legislation to get zones reversed so that the neighborhoods are picked clean by developers and sharks.
Case in point--there's a battle going on in SoHo right now that's completely between old school white transplants and new school white transplants. The old school transplants were artists who settled into SoHo in the 1950s-1960s and turned it into a vibrant artist's enclave. To prevent gentrification, they lobbied for measures that made it so that only artists could settle in the area.
In the 1990s, Yuppies started flagrantly flouting the measures, moving into the area illegally. By the 2010s, they collaborated with developers and real estate-friendly politicians to get the measures overturned, painting themselves a victims of "outdated" zoning laws. And now SoHo is being blighted by huge glass luxury towers for foreigners and rich carpetbaggers using them to park assets and launder money through.
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