I’d like to point out that even when this isn’t true, the “major public improvement” tends to border one, close enough that it gets cut off from the surroundings and goes into financial ruin causing others to look at the neighborhood a few years later and THEN decide its property that needs to be “improved” (gentrified)… To the point that the original inhabitants are priced out of their own family homes.

One of those “whew, they dodged a bullet… Of wait, they didn’t” times that happens quite a lot.