In railing against the passing of SoHo’s exhilarating, creative days—characterized by “the mix of artists, crafts-people, small manufacturers, researchers [!], as well as of commerce oriented to their needs,” Sorkin joins in the lamentation for “the rapid decline of the city’s industrial economy.” He doesn’t recognize that the SoHo he yearns for was precisely the product of that rapid industrial decline, which made economically available to artists and their hangers-on all those cool industrial spaces that in more industrially vibrant times would have been used by, well, industry.

In railing against the passing of SoHo’s exhilarating, creative days—characterized by “the mix of artists, crafts-people, small manufacturers, researchers [!], as well as of commerce oriented to their needs,” Sorkin joins in the lamentation for “the rapid decline of the city’s industrial economy.” He doesn’t recognize that the SoHo he yearns for was precisely the product of that rapid industrial decline, which made economically available to artists and their hangers-on all those cool industrial spaces that in more industrially vibrant times would have been used by, well, industry.

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Gentrification and Its Discontents - Magazine - The Atlantic

The Rebel Sell, a book with which I am utterly obsessed right now, has a similar, but more scorched earth, nuked from orbit, take-down of Naomi Klein’s identical laments over the gentrification of Toronto.