Because almost without exception these neighborhoods were built a long time ago, are closer to the city center and are the most expensive in the city. Until a few years ago it was possible for upper middle class like the dear readers of HN to afford these neighborhoods in middle tier cities like Boise, Austin, Denver, Nashville, etc. but now even those are out of reach unless you are wealthy or willing to pay most of your income in mortgage AND have two working parents.
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For about 20 years in there, we called that process gentrification and it was specifically led by ambituois young professionals (like those on HN) who bought into traditionally ethnic and/or ailing neighborhoods and filled them with cronut shops and ukelele performance centers (or boot stores and gastropubs).
But as you note, that movement petered out and more and more money came in and now those same neighborhoods are inaccessible to the same kind of people that first gentrified them.
Except that, as many predicted as gentrification became rampant, it's not really sustainable to drive all the service workers and their families out of the city center, and so now they just live on the streets outside of the cronut shops and gastropubs.
So if you give it another 10 or 20 years though, you can expect another urban flight to manifest and balance things out a little more again.