Nancy Reagan passed away recently and, although I was not a big fan, it is wise to sometimes take her advice and “just say no.” The redevelopment of the old Edgerton School as housing to relocate the residents of the Crystal Avenue housing project is one of these times.

A few years back, I spent an hour or so photographing the abandoned and collapsing Edgerton building, partly out of nostalgia, partly out of its appeal as a photographic subject (along the lines of the “disintegration chic” images coming out of Detroit), and partly as a reason to spend a little time in the neighborhood where I grew up. I attended Edgerton from kindergarten through 6th grade, when it was shiny and new.

One of the most interesting things about the school during that period (1964-1971), was the diversity of families whose children attended Edgerton. This was even more the case at the junior and senior high schools in New London, which of course serve everyone from the poorest families, in some of the public housing projects, to ones enjoying views of Long Island Sound. But the part of New London that sent students to Edgerton was ethnically, racially, and economically diverse.

Many people like to think they grew up “middle class,” and that term means different things to different people, but my classmates’ parents worked for employers like the city or other surrounding municipalities, the phone company, the public schools, Electric Boat, the “Sound Lab,” or Lawrence & Memorial Hospital.

Many students came from “the projects,” meaning Briarcliff and Bates Woods. The projects, and the people living there, were not something to look down on. In fact, it was often the preferred place to go play with your friends because of the limited traffic, the planned recreational space, the basketball courts and the resident population of kids to make up complete teams.

So in raising objection to the plan to relocate the residents of Crystal Avenue to the Edgerton site, I do not suggest that public housing, or “affordable” housing, is bad in any way. Rather, I write to urge New Londoners to consider the importance of balance and diversity to the livelihood of the city, and how its individual neighborhoods contribute to that diversity.

When my mother still lived on Ledyard Street, and I would walk from Union Station to our family home after riding the train from Boston, I’d observe what was going on in the neighborhoods along the way, including on streets like Ledyard, Cedar Grove, Ashcraft, and Connecticut Avenue. And what I saw was a neighborhood at a tipping point.

There was a mix of housing, as always, mainly single family homes but also two- and three- family, and some small apartment buildings, and, more importantly, a mix of maintenance conditions. Some properties remained well kept, which was the general condition growing up there, while others had fallen into decline, perhaps rented out by absentee landlords. Without a strong regional economy providing the financial stability to families living in New London, it didn’t bode well for the future.

We sold my family’s house almost a decade ago. You could buy my family’s old house for less today than we sold it for in the middle of the real estate crash of last decade. This doesn’t seem to be a neighborhood on the rise.

So how, then, does it make sense to construct (another) low-income housing project there? This part of New London is where essentially middle-class people have lived for generations. And while the middle class as we know it has itself been shrinking, what purpose is served by giving the neighborhood a final “push” out of that condition?

I’ve spent most of my career in government and the law trying to make cities better places to live. And cities, in my experience, get their lifeblood from diversity – a noisy, chaotic, exciting collision of races, religions, professions, economic classes, interests and perspectives. New London has few remaining places where the “middle class” fits – it’s got plenty of housing in neighborhoods affordable to low-income folks, and a good inventory of housing for high-income families in the Sixth District, but places for the middle class in New London are disappearing.

Here in Boston, it’s the wealthy homebuyers who are bidding up prices and “gentrifying” neighborhoods like the South End, where I live, and driving out middle-income people. And it’s having a negative effect, in the sense that it’s making the city less diverse and less vibrant.

The opposite is happening in New London (and many other smaller, economically struggling cities), where some middle-income neighborhoods are becoming lower-income ones (taking real estate values as one indicator). The neighborhoods that sent their kids to Edgerton are among those drifting that way.

In many cases, it is economic or demographic forces alone that cause neighborhoods (or entire cities) to lose their diversity. And these certainly have a leading role in what’s happening in New London. But it seems reckless to me that city leaders would actually vote to do something to push this neighborhood out of the middle class. And permitting the redevelopment of the Edgerton site for low-income housing is likely to do just that.

So if the mayor, and the council, believe that diversity is part of what makes New London great, and that middle-class neighborhoods are a part of that diversity, and therefore worth protecting, they should “just say no” or, more properly, “No, thank you.”

Peter O’Connor, a New London native, is an attorney and economic development consultant in Boston. He can be reached at peteroconnorboston@gmail.com.