Displacement is among the most discussed problems in the new urban renaissance. Among the socially conscious, the word is usually uttered in the same breath as "gentrification", while the more callous eschew any talk of it at all. Some view it as a social ill that we're all responsible for; others prefer to ignore it.

Regardless of where you stand, the fact remains that when a "bad" neighborhood gets cleaned up, thousands of people often have nowhere to go. As the once mean streets of America's big cities metamorphose into boutique-lined rows of uber-expensive condos, what becomes of the people who've always called those streets home?

These days, you have to be earning big bucks to rent an apartment almost anywhere in New York's five boroughs -- even Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, the locale of Do The Right Thing, Spike Lee's first great film about socio-racial unrest among Brooklyn's poor.

But not everyone's earning big bucks -- far from it.

In an attempt to resolve this problem, the Housing Authority in Washington D.C. is trying something new: After tearing down old, decrepit housing projects, the Authority is replacing them with new buildings intended to house diverse residents -- working class people, middle-income professionals, and the poor people who had lived in the area before. With the help of government subsidies, this plan represents a viable way to keep our cities from simply turning into suburbs.\