“Some big American cities are flourishing as at no time in recent memory. Places like New York and San Francisco appear to be richer and more dazzling than ever: crime remains low, new arrivals pour in, neighborhoods have risen from the dead.

But middle-class city dwellers across the country are being squeezed.

This time, they are being squeezed out by the rich as much, or more so, as by the poor — a casualty of high housing costs and the thinning out of the country’s once broad economic middle. The percentage of middle-income neighborhoods in metropolitan areas like Los Angeles, Chicago and Washington has dropped since 1970, according to a recent Brookings Institution report.”

A planner who quoted Jane Jacobs for years finally discovers what the author really said in her classic book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

In the largest public demonstration so far by opponents of the Atlantic Yards project planned near Downtown Brooklyn, a crowd that may have exceeded 2,000 gathered at Grand Army Plaza yesterday in a rally condemning the project’s scale and what many called inadequate public comment.