How do you deal with a shrinking community in a growing city? How important is retaining existing residents to maintaining culture? NPR corrospondent Steve Inskeep interviews state representative Garnet Coleman about his efforts to avoid “displacement by price, because their incomes are historically lower because they’re African American.”

Houston is set to add 1 million people this decade, and is generally considered a good example of an integrated urban community. However, the residents of the Third Ward are still predominantly African American, low-income persons who rent their homes.

Representative Coleman’s comments speak directly to the validity of gentrification as redevelopment. It begs the question, do new residents with no connection to the previous history of the city redevelop a neighborhood, or are they actually creating a new neighborhood as an overlay/displacement of the existing community?