Gary Orfield, the co-director of the Civil Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles, which published a study about school segregation in New York State last year, said it was rare for a school district to take advantage of gentrification to create more integrated schools. “This is exactly the opposite of what New York has been doing for decades,” Dr. Orfield said.
He said the residents who opposed the rezoning “aren’t racists.”
“They aren’t people who don’t want to be with other races and other cultures,” he said. “They just don’t want to be in a ghetto. They don’t want to be in a school where everybody’s poor and their kid is the only white kid or the only Asian kid.”
Well that explains everything. "They just don't want to be in a ghetto."