In every gentrifying city—that is, in every city where there is a combination of new coffee shops and condos, hipsters, and families struggling to hang on—you can usually trace the start of that change not to a few pioneering citysteaders but to a combination of federal, local, and state policies that favor the creation of wealth over the creation of community. Usually those policies come in the form of the deregulation and privatization of urban services: transportation, education, and especially housing. By the time the hipsters arrive, the political and economic forces that paved the way
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