<p>I have backed up all of my assertions with facts and figures. Repeating yourself is simply wishful thinking - as a Harvard partisan, perhaps you think you’ll deflect a few applicants away from Yale, which has recently surpassed Harvard as the most selective college in the country. I doubt it, given that New Haven now easily surpasses the other Ivy surroundings in terms of restaurants, nightclubs, cafes, bars, stores and other things to do, but due to its geography does not totally suck students away from feeling like they are part of a campus community.</p>
<p>As I said in more detail in posts above this one, New Haven’s racial composition has changed in the same way nearby New York’s has - due to tens of thousands of foreign-born people moving into the area. In both New York and New Haven, actually, the population of “poor/downtrodden” people has declined much more rapidly than the population of “middle class” people has. These people are simply getting priced out by immigrants, and by the rich. The evidence is pretty clear, with once-empty streets in New Haven and New York’s neighborhoods now lined with hundreds of various bodegas, salons, international wire transfer places, Spanish-speaking legal offices, small markets, Chinese take out restaurants, burrito stands and Peruvian chi-cha establishments. As anyone following real estate knows, these cities are also increasingly draws for the very wealthy, who want to be close to major cultural centers and nationally-renowned $50 per plate restaurants such as Ibiza (a place in downtown New Haven, below Cesar Pelli’s world headquarters, which the New York Times, Esquire and Wine Spectator have all featured and named the best Spanish restaurant in the country).</p>
<p>I’m sorry that Harvard Square is basically still a boring, commercialized, early-closing shopping mall, with horrible food, and that everyone there wishes to go back to the glory days of the 1970s and early '80s, when it was featured in several movies and was actually an interesting place of its own (and safer) - but there’s no need for people to take their frustrations out on everyone else here. </p>
<p>I see even Byerly has finally admitted that the “thousands of luxury condos” in New Haven are “9 tenths wishful thinking” – which means even the most die-hard Harvard partisan agrees that there are now hundreds!</p>