The New York Times has an interesting article on the rejuvination of the South Bronx. It seems that SoHo is now too trendy, so the hipsters are moving on.

Hundreds of artists, hipsters, Web designers, photographers, doctors and journalists have been seduced by the mix of industrial lofts and 19th-century row houses in the Port Morris and Mott Haven neighborhoods. Some now even call the area SoBro.

You would think this would be good news, but every silver lining is under a dark cloud.

"It's going to attract a class of people whose incomes and lifestyles are going to be radically different from those in the South Bronx, which is one of the poorest areas in the city," said Hector Soto, a lawyer active in developmental and environmental issues. Many of those fears coalesced around a rezoning measure passed by the City Council last March that essentially added another 11 square blocks of Port Morris to a five-block zone where, starting in 1997, apartments were permitted among the factories.

You read that correctly. The so-called "activists" are afraid that the Bronx won't remain poor enough. Never mind that poverty, at least as it is practiced in the South Bronx, breeds vandalism, arson, and rampant crime. It must be protected. Moreover, even the very people responsible for the rebirth of the area feel guilty about it.

"A lot of people in the Clocktower feel a sense of guilt," said Darcy Dahl, an artist whose work is exhibited at Haven Arts. "They feel they are part of the first wave of gentrification and they don't want the second wave to come, but they created it."

Only a liberal could apologize for lifting a neighborhood out of grinding poverty and crime.