Jaws dropped all over Rhode Island when people read, in last Friday’s Journal, that the Olneyville Neighborhood Association had asked United Way of Rhode Island not to move into its neighborhood.

United Way, now headquartered on Providence’s East Side, wants to buy Calendar Mills, renovated by the Baltimore-based developer Struever Bros. Eccles & Rouse. When the state’s biggest charity decides to move from the city’s richest neighborhood to one of its poorest, that’s charity putting its money where its mouth is.

When the neighbors say no, that is news. Man bites dog!

The neighborhood association’s target is not United Way but Struever Bros., the developer, which has taken the lead in redeveloping Olneyville.

The association claims that its concern is for “gentrification” — its term for an influx of residents and businesses with money to spend and jobs to create. A better neighborhood can mean rent hikes or even evictions for poor residents and small firms when rising property values increase taxes on landlords.

Of course, those rising property values and tax revenues also mean more money for municipal services, many of which are for poor people. But in any event, few developers work harder or spend more than the very civic-minded Struever Bros. to ameliorate the acknowledged downside of neighborhood revitalization.

Improvement of a community, can sometimes mean a diminution of the power of local activists who have done well in depressed neighborhoods. Is the flap over the United Way about some people trying to retain local power more than about anything else?

We suspect that most residents of Olneyville are glad to see the “Providence Renaissance” trickle down to them. This is it: Jobs and investment. Boring but useful.

Let’s hope that the absurdity of the Olneyville Neighborhood Association’s fatwa against Rhode Island’s largest charitable organization will become clearer, and in so doing bring people to their senses.