> Painting the "history of Brickell" as some sort of strategy to avoid gentrification is comically false

I didn't get that impression from the story. It said that Brickell helped avoid gentrification, not that it was intended as such. Rather, I understood the story to imply that if cities allow new building fairly freely, then gentrification is less likely to happen; SF doesn't allow it, while Miami does. Miami in fact sounds like the "default" from the article's perspective, so Brickell isn't a clever strategy, it's almost "doing nothing."