> A better question is why did those places have minority neighborhoods instead of anybody living anywhere they want?

Not to be mean, but is this question intentionally obtuse? It feels like a bad faith question to ask.

In America, in the relevant time periods (eg. 1950s), black neighborhoods were often targeted by infrastructure. This was before they had the protected rights to vote. This was a time where slavery, then legal segregation, and then redlining literally forced people of color into certain geographic regions.

THEN infrastructure projects literally bulldozed those neighborhoods.

So "why did people of color not live wherever they want, and why do we blame the bulldozers that destroyed the place they did live" is ignoring the history of so much systemic issues in America, that it feels like a bad-faith question to ask.