the 51 coolest neighborhoods in the world

[padraig (u.s.)]

The basic gentrification progression

Fringy (mostly) white people - punks etc
Artsy (mostly) white people
Kool yuppies i.e. graphic designers etc
Regular yuppies

If it's a "neighborhood" next to an urban center/financial center i.e. Soho or the West Loop here in Chicago there's an eventual 5th stage that goes beyond just generic yuppies to specifically people who can afford 1.4 million dollar condos, which includes the higher end of yuppiedom (techno-loving investment bankers and so on) as well as other kinds of legitimately rich people

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

It would be amusing in its regularity were it not for yunno the general wholesale displacement of pre-gentrification communities

Pilsen, Logan Square, Wicker Park, Ukrainian Village, Humboldt Park, Avondale, to name a few

The demographic story of the last 30 years in Chicago is basically the loss of POC (especially black) population and its replacement by affluent young professionals in and around greater downtown

Those neighborhoods above all function, among other things, as yuppie spillover displacing POC (mostly Hispanic in those examples)

A few years ago there was a billboard DT advertising some stupid fintech app. It was a grinning young woman in a business suit and it said "for when you want to buy your fixer-upper in Logan Square". We're talking about homes in the range of half a million dollars and up.

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

Tldr: fuck cool neighborhoods

 

[linebaugh]

Yeah, cuz then you and Gus would go there.

I was born in dallas texas leo, what choice do I have?

 

[linebaugh]

Yeah, cuz then you and Gus would go there.

 

[shakahislop]

View attachment 13197

i was really hoping you'd gone to the same place as leo and ordered the same food for a second

 

[shakahislop]

It would be amusing in its regularity were it not for yunno the general wholesale displacement of pre-gentrification communities

Pilsen, Logan Square, Wicker Park, Ukrainian Village, Humboldt Park, Avondale, to name a few

The demographic story of the last 30 years in Chicago is basically the loss of POC (especially black) population and its replacement by affluent young professionals in and around greater downtown

Those neighborhoods above all function, among other things, as yuppie spillover displacing POC (mostly Hispanic in those examples)

A few years ago there was a billboard DT advertising some stupid fintech app. It was a grinning young woman in a business suit and it said "for when you want to buy your fixer-upper in Logan Square". We're talking about homes in the range of half a million dollars and up.

its a massive trend isn't it. its a process that's been going on for so long by this point that it just feels like the natural ways of things. presumably it's not forever though. i've mostly lived in gentrified or gentrifying parts of town since i've had enough money to just not get the cheapest room i could find wherever. which isn't that long. but it means i've seen it first hand and obviously been some part of the process. where i'm from has gentrified as well, to a point where no-one i went to school with can afford to live there and have all left. personal notes aside it is a pretty important aspect of trying to navigate the western world at the moment and has been for a while, the ways that different people move into different parts of cities and how you individually interact with that.

i have the impression that for a while maybe in the 90s or early 00s the gentrification thing was happening in fairly small number of places, you could name them, williamsburg the lower east side wicker park shoreditch notting hill kreuzburg mission district. but my impression (without any evidence whatsoever) is that this is happening in pretty much every city these days. saw it along the canal in paris recently, bits of austin, bits of NOLA, i think even i ended up in a gentrifying bit of Dallas? mexico city. its happened comprehensively in oxford. that industrial bit of portland. bits of bristol, glasgow i think. part of the furniture, in the anglo world anyway. france spain italy etc are a lot harder for me to understand but it feels like less of a thing there.

 

[shakahislop]

when i lived in brooklyn it was a bit strange to be part of the process of pushing people out through paying more for housing than they could. because the process was ongoing you felt it more. it's a bit more comfortable living in gentrified manhattan, because with the exception of the social housing that's here to stay, the job is complete, you're inhabiting the ruins

 

[shakahislop]

the coolest place is obviously where most your mates live, these lists are approaching everything from the wrong angle as is probably apparent to everyone who reads them. it can get into you though, the idea that moving to a particular branded place is going to make you one of the cool people, which is kind of what all these articles are about. you can go to them if you're visiting a city i suppose, that's always a bit interesting, but you are probably not going to hardly speak to the people who live there except maybe to buy something from them, you're not going to go to the cool clubs by yourself are you

another thing i was thinking about with these kinds of articles, whoever wrote it has obviously never been to all these places, probably not even half of them, is this the writing of thirty different people? probably.

 

[Leo]

The basic gentrification progression

Fringy (mostly) white people - punks etc
Artsy (mostly) white people
Kool yuppies i.e. graphic designers etc
Regular yuppies

If it's a "neighborhood" next to an urban center/financial center i.e. Soho or the West Loop here in Chicago there's an eventual 5th stage that goes beyond just generic yuppies to specifically people who can afford 1.4 million dollar condos, which includes the higher end of yuppiedom (techno-loving investment bankers and so on) as well as other kinds of legitimately rich people

I'm sure people in Warhol circles thought people like me were clueless hayseeds and/or gentrifiers when we came to NYC. and jazz beatniks from the '30s/'40s felt the same way about the Warhol crowd when they came in the '50s/'60s. it's always been that way.

 

[linebaugh]

You can either move to iowa or be a gentrifier.

 

[linebaugh]

Think the only people who need to feel guilty about it are actual developers. Ive spent an average of probably 400 a month on rent my entire adult life and have gentrified every place Ive ever been

 

[Leo]

maybe ultimately, the coolest people are those who never left where they grew up. can't blame them for the changes that take place around them.

 

[linebaugh]

Think the conversation in general is overloaded towards housing. Most dont really have a choice where they live, unless you want to blame the people for not wanting to live in oklahoma their whole lives. Maintaining local preexisting economies seems to be as if not more important

 

[linebaugh]

Whats real insididious is the campus-ification of cities where a block is demolished for a devolpment that is sold as being in good proximity to some other entertainement-zone in another neighborhood entirely. In san diego there are apartments across the boarder whose selling point is that you'll never need to speak a word of spanish or hold pesos.

 

[linebaugh]

that seems to be whats happening to every downtown area in america

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

Let me clarify: @linebaugh is correct, the (mostly white) people moving into these neighborhoods are symptom, not cause. I myself have participated repeatedly in stages 1 and 2. It isn't reasonable to expect people not to want to move to big cities for all the reasons that young people have always moved to and lived in cities. Even developers - fucking scum of the earth that they almost always are - are responding to market pressures. You don't invest large sums of $ (or yunno, spend less large sums of $ to lobby and/or bribe local politicians to give you tax breaks and/or public funding to defray your development costs) without expecting a return.

The story of American cities is basically: post-WWII suburbanization via the personal car, exacerbated by white flight, decline (i.e. disinvestment), and then beginning in the early 80s, "revitalization" i.e. the reclamation of urban cores by capital. The Lower East Side is the early canonical example.

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

I disagree that the conversation is overloaded toward housing, bc who lives in a place very largely determines what kind of investment it will receive, what kinds of goods, services, and entertainment will be available to its residents, the quality of its public schools (which is largely determined by property tax). So housing is central.

Those campus style housing blocks are a variation on a theme, not a different thing. Here in Chicago you can often trace gentrification along El lines i.e. easy access to/from downtown. Logan Square is a prime example.

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

Also tbc, some urban revitalization is good. The ideal would be to improve the quality of life in neighborhoods without pricing out their inhabitants. I'm not claiming to know how to do that, tho I'm sure smart people somewhere have some ideas.

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

Capital essentially abandoned urban cores for a while then decided "no we want that back after all". It makes sense - urban centers are immensely valuable real estate. The 60-70s urban decline was the bizarre anomaly, and it coincides with deindustrialization.

In other words, basically the minute that civil rights opened the door to the middle class for black Americans, the stairway up to that door (unionized industrial jobs making home ownership and kids' college feasible) was demolished.

It's a particularly bitter, and very American, joke.