One popular strain of urban-policy thinking opposes gentrification'the arrival of affluent people into poor neighborhoods'and argues that poverty should be rectified by ever greater expenditure on public housing. The opposite might be true: Government spending can help, but it can also hurt, as badly designed public-housing projects have done. So long as gentrification brings rich and poor together, and offers the latter greater opportunity to take part in a healthy economy, it looks less like a villainous process and more like a heroic one. Few places illustrate the aspirations and failures of American housing policy as well as the Techwood Homes in downtown Atlanta'one of the first federal housing projects. Its completion, in 1935, even drew the attendance of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who switched on its electricity. To make way for the development, the old slums'in which roughly a quarter of residents were Black'had been cleared away. But the 604 new units were for white tenants...
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