midsized "cool" cities whose residents are overly angry about outsiders moving in and messing up their scene

ie austin, chapel hill (at least 12 years ago), portland (i assume), asheville

what's their deal

Boulder, CO

to be clear, i don't care what their deal is, i just want to make fun of them

when i was graduating from college we went to chapel hill to look around and see if we wanted to live there and some guy made a snide remark about too many people moving to chapel hill and now i'm so so glad we didn't end up moving to chapel hill

way to keep it positive

ime (and as a native portlander who still lives here) portlanders are not really that pissed about this b/c most portlanders themselves did this to portland over the past 3-5-10-20 years.

like the only people who ever complain about this are people who moved here in the past couple of years.

(i could also be totally wrong about this b/c i don't talk to anybody ever about anything)

that's probably a fair generalization for most of these cities

not a midsized city and only moderately "cool" in the same sense but anytime i read an article on los angeles where someone gently needles the city or suggests (x) type of food might be better in the city of (y), people tend to get overly angry. lots of "MOVE BACK TO THE TUNDRA" comments.

http://www.theonion.com/articles/pretty-cute-watching-boston-residents-play-daily-g,31554/

No! Keep the Tundra weird!!! xp

Parochialism lives!

not mid-sized, and not US... Berlin.

Maybe SF is too big, but I have heard so much whining about this shit lately

"lately"

I love when it's generational; damn kids are ruining all the cool shit from back in my day.

They're ruining the stuff we ruined!

Especially reviled: Computer dudes who countercommute to the south bay.

Every morning I see the Genentech bus and the Google bus on their way to the antipodes.

http://m.wsj.net/video/20100706/070610hubpm2/070610hubpm2_512x288.jpg

Tautologies are tautalogical

how is Portland not the first post

oh it is haha

Maybe SF is too big, but I have heard so much whining about this shit lately

tbf we have been inundated with a bunch of money-grubbing youngsters lately

basically dotcom boom v2.0 and it's just as annoying as it was then imho

LOL

If only we could be inundated with geriatric ascetics

whatever the cons are, the boom in austin has led to a shit ton of awesome places to eat and drink, so bring it.

what's not to love about geriatric ascetics!

I wish my upstairs neighbors were geriatric ascetics.

they're quiet, they're never in a hurry to get anywhere, they aren't constantly checking their mobile devices, they don't drive up rents

Isnt this gentrification

I wouldn't go that far, I'm just annoyed by young people with more money than they know what to do with, they're obnoxious.

i don't give a fuck abt money or w/e but when people move to ny to go to college it's easy to spot by their complete lack of subway etquette. feet up on the seats. giant backpacks on the seats. etc etc.

how is Portland not the first post

Allow me to be the first to invite you, Shakey, to come to Portland and mess up my 'scene' whenever you feel the urge. It would be a delight and a pleasure to have you live out the rest of your days in our fair, overly angry, city.

I usually visit Portland at least twice a year fwiw (in-laws)

a lot of people in denver (or colorado in general) are like this. like "denver useda be all cool, now it's just new yorkers and californians ooooh!" which i guess is true, my wife is from NY and I'm from california. in this case, it's usually code for "the liberals are coming!!!" i think.

granted all the people I know in Portland are transplants from Chicago, San Diego, and San Francisco lol. I love Portland tho! fun city

feel like Austin has outgrown this since the mid-90s. They've moved on to making fun of the lame-os who live in Georgetown and Round Rock

Shitty traffic and downtown being expensive are just part of the Austin experience now.

a lot of people in denver (or colorado in general) are like this. like "denver useda be all cool, now it's just new yorkers and californians ooooh!" which i guess is true, my wife is from NY and I'm from california. in this case, it's usually code for "the liberals are coming!!!" i think.

― tylerw, Thursday, March 14, 2013 10:51 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Right after I moved to Boulder, my friend and I caught shit from a bartender because she had an NY driver's license and I had a CA license.

If only we could be inundated with geriatric ascetics

― Canaille help you (Michael White), Thursday, March 14, 2013 3:28 PM (23 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i was thinking last night as i lie in bed how i haven't seen you around ilx lately and envisioning my resultant post to the Milk Carton thread. welcome back!

ha the bartender was probably from massachusetts or pennsylvania. no one is actually from boulder.

There was a time when Oregon was struggling under the load of new immigrants from California and elsewhere who simply did not fit in nor did they care to. It brought much friction, esp in the smaller Oregon towns.

atm, immigrants to Portland are not seen as a threat to some insular Oregonian way-of-life. The newbies tend to care about the place and want to live here and be happy, as opposed to just perching here, building walls and ignoring their neighbors as so many Cali immigrants did a few decades back, with their pockets full of cash from selling their overpriced houses down south. imo, the recent newbies improve the tone around here, not otherwise. they're engaged and engaging.

aimless and i are literally the only two native oregonians in the world tho

salt lake is the reverse of this, we try to impress the transplants (except if you're from socal, then you make other friends who are from socal). we may be sarcastically impressed but we're still impressed. then we take care of the baby.

jack cole was a native but he hasn't been sighted on ilx for a while now

http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mbjg4kfrEC1r4ydavo1_500.jpg
♫ Washed Out, "Feel It All Around" ♫

i know a dozen people in l.a. who are moving to or planning on moving to portland, or so it seems. they're friendly sorts, accept them kindly. i think they're just psyched that 300k would be able to get them a good house in a decent neighborhood rather than a shack nestled between a drug house and a serial murderer's body stash bungalow.

300k will get them a palace m/l

is the job market still v. tough in portland?

yes

it's getting better but it's still not good at all.

like to get a service industry position you essentially have to be in the owner's family. and just about everybody under 35 is in the service industry. tech/design stuff seems to be growing right now in a way it wasn't even before the crash, so that's good news at least.

i enjoy the fact that MPLS/STPL and Portland might as well have an exchange program, the number of people i know that have transplanted one to the other (both ways) is astounding

we are not overly angry about outsiders, we will just talk to you in a extremely friendly manner the first time we see you and then never speak to you again

we are willing to extend the "oh theres that dude i see at all the same bars i go to like 3 times a week" mild head nod

when i was graduating from college we went to chapel hill to look around and see if we wanted to live there and some guy made a snide remark about too many people moving to chapel hill and now i'm so so glad we didn't end up moving to chapel hill

franklin street is a bunch of chain restaurants now which is what sucks about people moving to a place: it attracts the mcdonaldses and the chipotles and the dominoses and the new folks say "oh cool they have dominos here! I love dominos" and then you might as well be living in sioux city

baltimore population increased 1,100 in 2012. residents are overly angry regardless of what happens though.

sioux city is no one-horse town, the skyline is quite extraordinary

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d1/Woodbury_County_Courthouse_setting_from_WNW_1.JPG

sioux city is pretty to look at for sure. I also had one of the most painful dental experiences of my life there so I may be biased

you should sioux the dentist

i hope it didn't involve siouxtures

Wilmington NC is just like this -- when I lived there, I knew a few locals (quite a few!) but most people were transplants because of the film industry/college.

This exact thing was said all the time about Wilmywood:
Shitty traffic and downtown being expensive are just part of the Austin experience now.

― Kiarostami bag (milo z), Thursday, March 14, 2013 5:52 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

I was not there for the film industry or college btw.

this thread has been weirdly north carolina-centric so far

NC is so "COOL"

was speculating earlier w/ my housemate on the existence of a 'UNC curse'—prominent deaths, athletic scandals, high-profile bungling of rape investigations... feel like the shittification of chapel hill (via chain stores & hi-rise condo towers) could be another piece of the puzzle

(FULL DISCLOSURE: I live in neighboring Carrboro)

also it's not the 90s anymore

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3uCKwDpFQIY

^^^from Carrboro^^^

also from Carrboro, also very "cool" before the outsiders moved in and messed up her scene:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9XKR_ifpVM

my roommate is from carrboro, we have a "christmas in carrboro" mug in our pantry. also she makes NC sound awesome and i'd love to visit there again some day provided no one gets overly angry about me moving in and messing up their scene

ms hunter and i moved to denver in 1990 (we didn't know each other) from upstate new york and nyc metro respectively, ppl always been lamenting the incoming droves. well, not at first when i first got here, because 1984-1990 was el busto. but def 93 onward.

Madison, WI is a midsized "cool" city but I think it doesn't have this at all for some reason, maybe because outsiders either go native or leave very quickly, and maybe because while a lot of people move here, it seems to stay pretty cheap and quiet anyway.

Keep (X) Weird

For anyone who know's Elizabeth Cotten's "Freight Train" album, the story behind "Graduation March" is supposedly that her little town was kind of a sleepy backwater at the time, so one of the things they would do as kids for entertainment was go over to chapel hill on graduation day for UNC and watch the ceremony, which I guess was outdoors. She learned the march by ear, and there you have it.

Don't know if that really fits the theme of the thread or not, but it's a neat story.

Seattle def. qualifies for this thread. It seems like it has the largest tech bubble (again) too, second or third(?) to the Bay Area.

lmao @ lamers not living in la or nyc

Maybe SF is too big, but I have heard so much whining about this shit lately

tbf we have been inundated with a bunch of money-grubbing youngsters lately

― his girlfriend was all 'ugh and he wears a solar backpack' (Shakey Mo Collier), Thursday, March 14, 2013 3:17 PM (8 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

basically dotcom boom v2.0 and it's just as annoying as it was then imho

― his girlfriend was all 'ugh and he wears a solar backpack' (Shakey Mo Collier), Thursday, March 14, 2013 3:17 PM (8 hours ago)

Seriously!!! The only good thing about it is that some of my steadfast SF pals are finally moving to the East Bay.

And wtf is up with the $75 artisanal barber shop on Valencia?

Which one?

jk (I think there is still only one). As I get older I care less about money grubbing youngsters and more about whether or not Park and Rec is going to redo a nearby park.

We're a midsized city not yet deemed cool (we're so cool nobody's discovered us yet). But some locals have launched a pre-emptive campaign anyway.

http://www.wbir.com/images/300/169/2/assetpool/images/120208120359_0051.jpg

can we expand this thread beyond the USA

hello Brighton

Cleveland aspires to be one of these, and thinks it already is, but it isn't.

I hate Boston. I've got a sticker on my record player that says "Keep Boston Out of Providence." My friend Ren had them printed up a while back--kids from Boston who go to shows in Providence are assholes.
― Ian Johnson (orion), Wednesday, March 10, 2004 9:21 PM (9 years ago)

Sucks. I can't think of a single area within 300 miles of here that fits the title's qualification.

Well, unless by "outsiders" you mean "Mexicans."

I was wondering if this applies to anywhere in the UK apart from Brighton.

You get this kind of thing in parts of London (e.g. Keep Hackney Crap) but that's not really the same?

burlington vt seems like it should be one of these but i guess there's just not enough industry around there for people to flock there successfully

And wtf is up with the $75 artisanal barber shop on Valencia?

have you stepped into the attached clothing store? don't, because you might breathe wrong on a $2000 blazer reeking of authenticity

btw that place is a brooklyn transplant

this is an argument my wife and I have had for a while about Austin. I'm all for the massive expansion and modernization of the downtown area and all the food and entertainment amenities it's brought. My wife appreciates those things as well but feels that the huge influx of young, hip people to the downtown area has made middle aged suburbanites like us feel less welcome to partake in those same amenities.

Having transplanted to Portland about 8.5 years ago, I always got the feeling that the main vehemence about incomes was against all the SF/LA types who came north and destroyed the housing market.

On a job interview with a Portland-native some years back, he made an offhand comment about strongly disliking that all the Californians had moved up here and brought California with them. I'm presuming he meant the unplanned and unregulated upper-middle-class suburban sprawl that took over Hillsboro(where Intel HQ is) and is creeping farther and farther out.

xp weird. Oakland now seems flooded with middle aged surburbanites due to the expansion and modernization of the downtown area and all the food and amenities it's brought.

everytime I visit oakland and look for this brooklyn-esque yuppie paradise that apparently exists now all I see is a few coffeeshops

And wtf is up with the $75 artisanal barber shop on Valencia?

lol yeah I have marveled at this place but fuck if I'm going in there - I still get my haircut downtown by old gay guys for $25

some of these ridiculous new places on Valencia remind me of the Oxygen Bar (RIP). just in terms of their overpriced uselessness.

my only complaint about east coasters and californians moving here (denver), is that they are totally content paying outrageous rental costs/housing costs in this fucking cow town, hence making it really stupidly expensive

that def bothers me - altho as a homeowner it doesn't affect me directly, it's crazy how these young tech-rich people can come in and think nothing of dropping $5k a month on a 2br apt that they aren't even going to stay in for any appreciable amount of time, and then the rents go crazy, people get evicted etc.

Yeah, it doesn't affect me as I live in a friend's house and pay 2005 level rent, but I may not live here forever... a friend recently tried to find an apartment and was hard pressed to find a 1 bedroom under $1k/month. Not even a nice one bedroom.

omg the oxygen bar!!!! I remember hating on that place and Blondie's back in the day.

everytime I visit oakland and look for this brooklyn-esque yuppie paradise that apparently exists now all I see is a few coffeeshops

you are clearly in the "wrong" part of town, dude. We have at least a dozen fashionable restaurants with one word names that serve artisanal finger food for $10 a small plate in a 5 block radius.

rockridge doesn't count, that's basically berkeley

dude, your ignorance is showing like a motherfucker, I am not talking about fucking rockridge

I have been to the right parts of town and seen like the 2 coffeehops

oakland is still basically just poor and dangerous, but you have that art show once a month I guess

FP'ED YOU FOR FRONTING!

the point oakland will be some hip gentrified town will be when somebody writes an article about oakland and doesn't talk about that one art show that happens once a month, this will prob be 30 years from now

Oh, you are just trolling n/m

i was just in oakland for the first time in years and it was waaaay nicer than i remember. there were some places with maybe two coffeeshops, but those were the same places that years ago they had nothing at all (and where my friend's car batteries were jacked repeatedly) and where a nice little coffeeshop would have gotten its windows broken after less than a month. also way more korean and generally asian than i remember. my friends in the area confirmed that things had really changed too.

the parts of sf i saw, on the other hand (downtown, only), looked even more filled with really hopeless homeless people than i remembered.

like oakland is not some hip gentrified town from what i saw, but on the other hand, parts of it were sorta... nice, which they absolutely were not like 10 years ago.

well there's a difference between 'now there is a coffeeshop w/ windows that are not broken' and the way neo-oakland gets portrayed in articles

There is a really great disparity between different parts of Oakland. It used to be that there were only a few "nice" parts outside of the hills, now there are more. Rents have jumped a lot, both residential and commercial.

xp Dude, my former arts space was in a small warehouse building paying less than $1.00/sq ft until 2005. Now there is huge condo tower and two restaurants with valet parking, and a starbucks.

I welcome all outsiders to my city.

again it's not that nothing has changed, obv more people live downtown, my point is that the city is a million miles away from how it's portrayed, ie west coast williamsburg. it's still mostly a city of fast food joints and bleak areas.

they do have a really insane mormon church tbf

when i was in Brooklyn I saw a lot of fast food joints and some bleak areas to be fair

well brooklyn, like oakland, is enormous but the total area of bougie brooklyn is about 100x the total area of bougie oakland

dude, no one is saying that oakland is as bougie as brooklyn, only that you clearly are fronting when it comes to your "knowledge" of what oakland is "like now"

so Brooklyn really changed in the last 5-7 years, last time I went it was mostly bleak with a few bright spots.

lol I took my gf around Oakland a few months ago when we were in California and tried to hit as many neighborhoods as we could in a day

it was pretty boring

oakland's lucky that commuting from there to the tech giants in the south bay is impossible

San Mateo bridge?

I dunno anything about commuting. one day BART will complete the loop, or so they say.

even bart to san jose doesn't really make it a particularly nice commute unless you work in downtown sj

the total area of bougie brooklyn is about 100x the total area of bougie oakland

ftfy

brooklyn is 81 sq miles, oakland is 56...

hey nobody posted anything about philly. is anybody moving to philly. anybody at all. helllloooooooooooooooo??

*wolf howls*

<i>Seattle def. qualifies for this thread. It seems like it has the largest tech bubble (again) too, second or third(?) to the Bay Area.

― ma ck ro ma ck ro (mackro mackro), Thursday, March 14, 2013 11:20 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink</i>

the 90s felt like more of a crazy disruptive time imo, i was actually coming here to say i'm proud that seattle has gotten past this phase & is now just an expensive, congested, gentrified eternal bubble zone.

also homoII that is distressing to hear about rents in denver, last place i lived in 2010 i paid $695 for a beautiful (albeit ground floor) 1br in capitol hill.

that would be at least $900 now, or possibly more. My old 2 bedroom across the street from City Park was $750, now it's $1200.

乒乓, if I ever have to move back to the east coast, Philadelphia is my most likely destination.

What????

I will always associate Philly with an image my brother described to me when he lived there: a pregnant woman smoking a cigarette while waiting for her local dive bar to open in the morning

Would you prefer Millsboro, Delaware? xp

Somewhere warm.

Yeah, it doesn't affect me as I live in a friend's house and pay 2005 level rent, but I may not live here forever... a friend recently tried to find an apartment and was hard pressed to find a 1 bedroom under $1k/month. Not even a nice one bedroom.

I was looking at moving to CO but decided against it cause the rents were so high, that surprised me. Like random town in CO a few hundred higher than just outside Chicago wtf.

which random town?

Aspen

I WAS LOOKING AT MOVING TO CO USING THIS LOTTERY SYSTEM I DESIGNED

there's always been crazy money in colorado, it's just in more places now

otm

If iatee can come to Oakland and not find any of the cool stuff that gives me hope that I will still be able to afford the place for awhile.

that one art show that happens once a month

aka the one day a month I refuse to go downtown lol

in the random CO town i live in you can rent a pretty sweet house for less than i paid for a one bedroom in boston in 2003.

places that have cool stuff that tourists can find are generally not very "cool"

chicago

which random town?

looked at a bunch of diff ones, idk. not Aspen.

discreet: Yeah, Seattle's finally along the way to catching up to Vancouver in becoming MegaArtisanMallLand. It took about 5 years for that to start, probably due to October 2008 & WaMu's death. Selfish Me is happy my partner and I bought a townhouse in Greenwood for cheap in '09. The only thing from it becoming even more expensive is the relatively crappy public transit.

I still enjoy Seattle, but much more now for the non-retail amenities like parks, walks, the occasionally urban decay, more house parties & get-togethers & friends & trivia nights, etc.

My favorite new part of the greater city is Eastgate (in Bellevue.) Aside from being mostly concrete along I-90, it's nice to know there's such a thing as good Indian food everywhere and Lil' Jon Restaurant.

http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5060/5489482190_34a58c7205_z.jpg

I'll bet their cherry pie is worth a stop.

乒乓, if I ever have to move back to the east coast, Philadelphia is my most likely destination.

― carl agatha, Friday, March 15, 2013 5:48 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

nice!

I'll bet their cherry pie is worth a stop.

The condition of the windows and walls, however, is deplorable. I always see a sign for this place along the freeway on my way to Seattle and I still always lose my shit.

I've been to SF, Seattle, and Portland at least a couple times apiece and know people who live in all of them though I make no claims to know them as a resident. To me it feels like they all went through a big influx of people and the reputation as the hip west coast city. SF dealt with it in the 60s and 70s, Seattle in the 80s and 90s, and Portland is dealing with it right now. The former two feel like they've sort of matured and gotten over it and settled in and aren't as concerned with other people's opinions while Portland is still a shitty teenager trying to keep itself weird.

http://www.uwishunu.com/2013/03/quotable-mark-bittman-calls-philadelphia-the-most-underrated-city-in-the-world/

philly is so much cooler than oakland

the funny thing when i lived in philly (late 80's to y2k) was when people would make a big deal about finally getting out of the stinking town and moving to san fran or wherever and then you would see them again a few months later and try not to make a big deal about them running home to the land of cheesesteak and cheap rents. we understood. if you are in philly too long nobody else will have you!

living in the la la land of marthas vineyard for 6 years it was just a given that everyone not from there was a frenemy. you hated them but you needed them to live. unless you too were rich.

i want more people to come to western mass! god's country! cheap houses! good food! lots of records and books! if you telecommute you should totally do it. the train to nyc is coming to greenfield! you won't miss a trick!

Western Mass rules. Rent got insane in Northampton over the last 12-15 years, though.

the only other place in the country i would live is philly, love yer town. but i still love mine more

yeah true northampton and amherst i wouldn't tell people to buy/rent a house there. but around those places are bargains galore. unless they are filthy rich and want to start a ninja turtle dynasty or something. then they should move to those places.

greenfield is only 20+ minutes down the road and when i go to northampton and walk around i always say to myself: oh, right, rich people! whole color-coordinated clothing families. so clean and purty. i feel like i just fell off the turnip truck.

you see this in big cities sometimes but it's usually based on a neighborhood, not the whole city, since big cities are generally dependent on large groups of people moving in

xp

Haha, I know the feeling. There were a fair amount of affordable places to rent in Northampton in the late 90s/early 00s, but they all got condofied.

I will never forget eating at Zahav in Philadelphia. Oh man that food oh man oh man.

Is Philly really midsized? It's like the 5th biggest in USA isn't it?

yeah philly is huge.

what about Akron? Do they have this thing going on? It seems to produce a disproportionate amount of awesome bands.

it took me 40 years to find my home. and at 44 i am finally home for good. feels nice.

the bizarros are from akron. that's reason enough to live there, if you ask me.

i enjoy the fact that MPLS/STPL and Portland might as well have an exchange program, the number of people i know that have transplanted one to the other (both ways) is astounding

― O_o-O_O-o_O (jjjusten), Thursday, March 14, 2013 6:27 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

west minneapolis iirc, the axis is strong. what's weirder to me is that it seems like there are ppl that make the move several times? like move to portland for a year or two, then back to mpls, then back to portland, etc.

man now i am bummed about moving :(

it took me 40 years to find my home. and at 44 i am finally home for good. feels nice.

― scott seward, Saturday, March 16, 2013 4:25 PM (45 minutes ago) Bookmark

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sea3lnVgyrY

it took me 40 years to find my home. and at 44 i am finally home for good. feels nice.

I miss wmass so much, but at least I'm not too far away. It definitely felt like home, though. If you could get Chicago food there, it'd be perfect.

Despite the influx of people to Austin, I still wish more family and friends would move here. I think my family has a hard time grasping why I might want to live here instead of Boston, Seattle, or California when the answer is obvious: it's much cheaper to live here and jobs are plentiful.

I miss Western Mass. It was my home away from home in the late 80s/early 90s.

But if I move back east I think Baltimore & Philly are the only places I'd choose to live longterm. Nothing but good memories from the mid- to late 90s, which, admittedly, was a fair amount of time ago.

friend my dad knew on Martha's Vineyard had a saying for this: "Last one off the boat is the first to say No More Building."

It's addressed earlier but the relatively recent immigrants are the ones who are the most sensitive about newcomers continuing to come and ruining the land, the scene, the vibe.

Saw this guy today from across the hotel lobby:

http://i.imgur.com/ljfykGj.jpg

I will always associate Philly with an image my brother described to me when he lived there: a pregnant woman smoking a cigarette while waiting for her local dive bar to open in the morning

― his girlfriend was all 'ugh and he wears a solar backpack' (Shakey Mo Collier), Friday, March 15, 2013 4:50 PM (1 week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I have seen this in rural MN.

Tomorrow morning there will be a thousand pregnant women smoking a thousand cigarettes in front of a thousand closed bars across this great land of ours.

my experience in Portland was that the only PDX natives that got all up in arms about out of towners were squares who railed against the hipsters coming in and fucking up everything, not really people involved in "scenes" to begin with

https://sphotos-b.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-snc7/579094_463048977101770_661970339_n.jpg

smdh

oh shit, wrong thread

was it, though?

in a sense, yes?

but in a sense, no?

All those hiipsters ruined Highland...

I tech bubbled my way to Seattle from post-graduate indolence in Western Mass. I'm pretty sure there's nobody in Northampton/Amherst angry about outsiders messing up their scene because the only outsiders who move in are professors and Hampshire graduates who don't feel like leaving and get jobs at ice cream stores.

I don't know how people feel about outsiders coming to Seattle to work for Amazon & Microsoft at this stage in the game. I live in a neighborhood where every construction project is some boxy six-story mixed-use rental development (and I live in one of these) and people in the comments section on The Stranger get pissy about it. But it doesn't feel boring here.

i live in seattle again and grew up here and am glad to see all the new faces. it feels fresh, it matches what's around us

amazon microsoft starbucks etc. have ruled seattle for a generation now. it's a very different city from the blue collar boeing/logging town it was. new development is just adding to the wholesale cultural change of the 90s imo.

portland is weird because as ppl have mentioned above it's such a transitory new population. so many young underemployeds just dropping in for a bit, many name musicians being the most obv examples.

We still got the blue collar Boeing demographic on lock here in Everett. (The last lumber mill just shut down a year or two ago though and is in the process of demolition.)

probably better to move into extremely unhip smaller city next to giant thriving megalopolis like yonkers or long beach or any jersey city besides hoboken and just wait until gentrification hits you after you've already bought cheap or locked in a long-term rental deal

the answer is Vallejo!