Certainly any neighborhood should have some control over what its larger community can impose upon it — hence block organizations, community boards, the whole system — but some people (and some neighborhoods) are more equal than others. Which brings me to my next point.

Wealth and privilege afforded them the ability to mount a strong defense incredibly quickly. Should they have succeeded and then plans for a second greenmarket gone forth in a poorer neighborhood, and if the lower class neighborhood were against it, they would likely not have had the ability to oppose it. This happens over and over with actual negative developments like industrial infrastructure.

I think the fact that there were two proposed locations, one in a wealthier area and one in a poorer area, supports either one of or both of these theories. There was no opposition to the greenmarket in the poorer area. Either they did not have the natural assumption of elites that such a thing would be noisy, dirty and attract poor people — or they did but didn’t have the skills and experience necessary to organize against it (they certainly knew about it, we flyered that neighborhood like the dickens). Or both.

(On the other hand, the flyering could have been the significant variable in this experiment — too bad we learned of the second location later than the first. Possibly it wouldn’t have made a positive difference, serving instead as advance warning to give them more time to find arguments to support their predisposed position — but I’m loathe to make my own class-based assumptions and further perpetuate and compound the problems. We’ll definitely be trying to get all power loci on our side “next time.” It would be nice to have the advantages of wealth and privilege working for us, to the benefit of everyone in the area.)

And I hate to say it but you went to Brearley; you are the bourgeouis.