GRAY LADY GETS VAPORS OVER — CHECKING NOTES — DESEGREGATION: The South Park Reactionaries at the New York Times.

White people are moving into previously black neighborhoods in the cities. Many urban blacks are moving into white suburbs. There is a word for this process: desegregation. Desegregation is a good thing, no? Yet the New York Times is rolling out its customary Very Worried Tone as it looks at what’s happening to real estate near downtown Raleigh, North Carolina.

A lengthy piece with interactive color-coded maps and charts uses the South Park neighborhood, previously inhabited almost entirely by blacks, to illustrate nationwide trends. Between 2000 and 2012, the white population rose to 17 percent in South Park. Since then, nearly nine in ten new mortgages have gone to whites. South Park is one of many indications that white and black Americans are venturing out of their long-held enclaves and mixing more.

You might be value-neutral on this trend (since people should be judged as individuals, it doesn’t matter what demographic boxes your neighbors check) or you might read it as a positive (assuming various cultures are linked to race and ethnicity, being exposed to difference might make you a better or more well-rounded person). But it takes a crabbed and ungenerous soul to find the trend alarming, as the Times does. The paper wonders whether “the area’s sudden reinvention will erase the last remaining signs of its history,” but cites no examples of anything of historic importance being removed from the South Park landscape. What seems to be happening is that run-down buildings and empty lots are giving way to chic modern homes. To the naked eye, this looks a lot like improvement.

Of course. But the ghost of Woodrow Wilson and other original “Progressives” is strong at the Times.