I really like Lauren Halls work, but I wonder if it will be tagged by spray paint in South Central? Should it be tagged?

Here's a little something about a neighborhood like South Central or Harlem versus other urban and suburban neighborhoods full of people who moved there from somewhere else. I know this because I have lived in and taught kids from a few places like that. Black urban neighborhoods are very old fashioned communities in that everyone knows each other, because few people leave since they don't go to college. Almost everyone is either distantly related to each other, or at least went to school together since they all attended the same public school. That is a blessing and a curse. The blessing is that they are not just a mass of strangers that happen to live in the same place. The curse is that they are trapped together, the good with the bad. Folks can commit any kind of crime from dumping garbage on the street, to chid abuse, to selling fentynal or crack, to murder, and they won't be snitched on by the people they know, which is everyone. If they do co-operate with the police to see justice done, stop the victimization of others, or to improve the neighborhood, that informing is consider a worse crime than murdering someone in cold blood, and there will almost certainly be some kind of street retribution. And so the social pathologies and crime go on and on, and the only way those 'hoods will improve is to have strangers move in that will call the cops when they see bad shit go down, and then press charges. That's an element of gentrification that actually benfits the law abiding people that live in the neighborhood, at least if they can hold on to their houses.

By the way, if Asians are moving into an urban neighborhood in Pittsburgh, it is already gentrified.