If you are going to write an article you should at the very least have your information correct.

On to the point you were trying to make about gentrification, which you are hoping to portray as a wholly negative thing. The reason that we have the ever increasing rent costs is due to the seemingly endless amounts of money that IC and Cornell students (or their parents) throw around. And yes that does effect many people who are low income, but it has also forced out the middle class in Ithaca, people like myself have been forced out to areas like Dryden, Groton, and Enfield because of it.

Every time someone attempts to build new housing in the City of Ithaca we have an extended conversation in City Hall and in the media about ensuring that there is affordable housing. Just look to Breckenridge Place:

At Breckenridge Place, the 50-unit INHS building opened in May 2014, 31 of the units are reserved for people making half of the area’s median income. For a single person, that ceiling is $27,594 and for couples $31,531: salary ceilings that many cooks, students, and artists. There are also units reserved there for people making 60 percent and 90 percent of the median income, and their rents are somewhat more depending on pay: on the whole, apartments there range in price from about $650 to about $1,150 per month. ithaca.com

Another aspect of gentrification is the replacement of small businesses in the community. For that you can place the blame squarely on Svante, but and the Commons build. But to be fair to him, we don't know the long term effects of all the upgrades and work. You could argue that the storefronts that are gone simply weren't viable to begin with if they couldn't withstand the construction period.

Or we can focus on the West End, I mean nothing screams hipster gentrification like The Westy (where you can often find Mayor Myrick) and the surrounding blocks which have slowly transitioned from a drug fueled stab fest into a slightly less drug fueled location for thriving small business like the Kitchen Theater and Saigon Kitchen but also a place for human services. There is the DSS office, Office for the Aging, Cayuga Addiction Recovery Services, the Southern Tier Aids Program (and their needle exchange), and the expanded Fingerlakes Planned Parenthood.

And there is the bad as well. The poor in our community are forced into cramped buildings owned by slum lords, and many of those places fall outside of the city. I'd like to be a bit more of a bleeding heart but it is a but difficult when you have things like Section 8 (administered by Tompkins Community Action and Ithaca Housing Authority), HUD grants, Catholic Charities, and DSS paying for said housing. Not to mention things like STEHP (Solutions to end Homelessness program) and FUP (Family Unification Program).

To be quite honest, I don't give two shits about micro-aggression on a college campus that I couldn't afford to go to and what yuppies think about downtown Ithaca and its because I work down there and spend my money down there. I know the communities on Corn St and Plain St because it is where I have spent the last twenty years of my life. Low income families suffer in this community, we can agree on that, but there isn't a rush of anyone attempting to take over their communities. You'd know that if you came off the hills.

/rant

edit: small typos, and boy did I jump from one thing to another.