It's funny, I wrote the Wikipedia article on Mid-City Mall... I don't think it's an example of gentrification. It was built by an out-of-state guy who didn't know or care how to build a mall (which is why it's so weird). It originally looked much more like a strip mall than today. He cared more about writing it off for its depreciation so he put no money into maintenance, and that became a serious problem in the 1970s... simply because the mall was 10 years old and falling apart without maintenance. It was just this oddity singular to that one guy's ill-advised adventure in mall building... the whole decline was solved when a new owner bought the mall a year later.

Also funny is to look at the initial stores in the mall... if the word yuppie had existed in the 1960s, it would have been used for something like the Bavarian Sidewalk Cafe.

If the 1970s were truly a time of decline for the Highlands, why was the 1400 Willow building under construction at the time? Investors don't put tens of millions of dollars into erecting the most luxurious residential building in the state if they think they neighborhood is some declined has-been.

I doubt anyone would argue that the Highlands of today is pretty yuppie. But it's not a new development, it was a yuppie neighborhood in the 1980s when the term was coined. Not all yuppie neighborhoods are also gentrified neighborhoods... some were always wealthy.