Subsidised complex turns itself into a gated community

New York

THE instinct to shun and exclude comes all too naturally in the human spirit - the boy bullied by his brother at home arrives at school ready to menace; the billionaire locks himself in his tower among his own tribe; one group, trounced by the ruling order, finds another on which to enact a misguided revenge.

As Jacob Riis observed in How the Other Half Lives, his classic documentation of 19th-century slums on the Lower East Side of Manhattan: "The once unwelcome Irishman has been followed in turn by the Italian, the Russian Jew and the Chinaman and has himself taken a hand at opposition, quite as bitter, against these later hordes."