I understand the lure of value of enclaves. Comfort is, well, comfortable.
When my family moved to New Orleans we may as well have moved to the moon. Nothing could have been more alien to our experience. My parents rented an apartment in the Italian section. what we didn't know was that we were situated uncomfortably near the black section. Our neighbors were OK, polite but standoffish. I guess they had no better ideas about us than we had about them. Our landlord, who was Mexican, lived downstairs. He and his wife owned this huge tri-plex and rented out 2/3 of it. they had no time and less patience for us kids. He wasn't very well liked by his Italian neighbors and there were semi-regular verbal feuds that took place.
Of course the Italian neighbors weren't exactly shy - it seemed like anything worth saying (and even when it wasn't) was worth letting everyone within a 4-block radius know all about it. Everything from good morning greetings to spats had to be done at concert volume. It was quite unsettling for us but we got used to it.
The part that I never got used to was being chased home from school by the gangs of blacks who came out of their own neighborhoods to prey on the whites. It would seem that, even though I instinctively understood the concept of "strength in numbers" I was destined to be a lone wolf.