It's a lot harder to make a snap judgement regarding a person's socio-economic status if they live in an unremarkable apartment. If someone lives in a trailer park or a terrifying drug-infested cinder-block shithole, though, you can make some guesses about them right away.

I snark, but I'm also serious. An awful lot of lower-middle-class suburbanites see large, inexpensive housing complexes (be they trailer parks or low-rise apartment buildings) as systems for isolating lower-class people from the surrounding neighborhood.

I would expect a really small apartment building project, well-integrated with my neighborhood, to face grassroots opposition. Some of the suburban governments I've lived under actually planned to demolish well-kept, inexpensive, functioning apartments and replace them with expensive single-family houses. There is more than a hint of racism bound up in this, and this seems so obvious to me that I'm surprised the article didn't even broach the possibility.