ROLLING HIPSTER STUDIES 09

Life in the capital may be good for the govster, but is it good for the country?

omg what a fucking dork

aaahahaha omg that was so cringey and long winded, I only read about half and skimmed the rest but I still don’t get what the takeaway is supposed to be, also gentrification and superficial trendiness don’t make a city “cool”???

omg it never ends

this david fontana guy is cool

literally burst out laughing when I got to the reveal line explaining what a govster is

FWIW, the phenomenon he is describing is called extreme wealth inequality and that's why the same thing is happening in every city

apparently what distinguishes d.c. govsters is their knack for columbusing gentrification, not identified as such of course because they're so "cool"

Yet the culture of urban hipsters — people who wore trucker hats but had never been in a truck

A dynamic country may need a little cool in its capital; but have things in Washington gone too far? The question is as old as the republic, and arguably more important than ever.

how is this not the onion

Sparky’s Espresso Cafe was a few blocks from my apartment off 14th Street NW, but in the years after I moved to Washington in 2006, it felt to me like home. To get there from my apartment, I needed to walk by a decaying dry cleaner and a homeless shelter.

“needed” is doing some interesting work there

Today, Sparky’s has been gone for 11 years — replaced first by the more stylish Cork Wine Bar and eventually by a make-your-own meatball chain opening its first location outside of New York.

i'm sorry a what now

i assume you use a piece of spaghetti to string them on

I disagree with Fontana's "govster" diagnosis but I completely sympathize with the idea that if DC actually becomes a "cool" place to live then an important quality of American life - that our national capital and most powerful city is a place for dorks, really only worth visiting for the museums - will be lost. But the silver lining of having cool kids move here could be that we finally make some lasting headway on the homeless problem and run Dan Snyder out of town and change the fucking team name.

There is a lot of weird reverse NIMBYism from longtime Washingtonians, regardless of race or class categories, about neighborhoods that used to be run-down (i.e. that had homeless shelters, dry cleaners, bodegas) now being full of posh businesses. I'm a little guilty of that myself, when Dupont Circle stopped being gay it got incredibly fucking boring practically overnight.

it's hard to believe a gayborhood had anywhere to go but up!

I had to look up the address. It's a branch of a chain called Meatball Shop. That's a restaurant that serves meatball sandwiches and pastas. You don't make your own meatballs there.

here's courtland milloy's old take on the 14th street turnaround, which he makes explicitly about race and income inequality: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/yes-14th-street-may-be-better-these-days-but-something-vital-is-missing/2015/07/21/f144a65c-2fce-11e5-8f36-18d1d501920d_story.html

brb gonna open a chain of make-your-own-meatball restaurants

That's a baller idea

does "cool kids" moving someplace really have much to do with Zagat stars as mentioned in the article? or with addressing homelessness?

nobody cares about zagat ratings and michelin stars but they are a lagging indicator of the DC food scene's development over the last 15 years or so.

gentrifiers, by providing lots of new property tax revenue among other things, could enable DC to do a lot of good things for our poorest people. Unfortunately our big plan right now seems to be paying suburban hotels $80,000 a night to house homeless families. Wishful thinking on my part.

if it’s like every other city, the property tax revenue is blasted in the short term by abatements and “affordable housing” that flips into condos at the first opportunity

so maybe in a number of years there is more tax revenue, but just as likely you end up with high-priced single rental units, secondary properties, etc

The people he's describing just aren't that cool. To a certain extent it's probably the same phenomenon that happens with every cultural movement, where eventually a little bit of it rubs off on people in all walks of life, even government. In the 70s capitol hill aides had long hair and huge sideburns. Today they partake in locally sourced foodie culture or w/e.

now you just end up with chain department stores selling decent shirts that are inspired by trends of a few years back, as always

the devil wears prada movie had a dorky fashion dialogue scene about this, that color you’re wearing hit the shelves because a bunch of people fought it out and it won and it was couteur and then copied and then downmarket

and then eventually applebees made it a menu item and they installed brick pavers on the street in front, and then you have culture

yeah I feel like this guy is just a one-percenter but in that wing of the one-percent where it's really important to believe that spending your money at "foodie" places = "cool," that all the cool hip people want to live in your city and eat at those places or whatever. in fact cool people everywhere look down on these people, while washing dishes in the back.

oh he is so far from one percent. not sure how divided it is in DC but he codes as upper middle class or maybe upper class in-city but single home guy. maybe could afford a lake house shack

the thing is that all of these things code as people with just enough money who think they are talking about social striving but are really just throwing half-assed signifiers out everywhere. people with less money look to those recommendations. there is always an up-and-coming part of any metro area where people visit and say “oh yeah I went to blah restaurant and it was nice and we got drinks at other place” but it’s generally middlebrow and enjoyable but nothing out of the ordinary. and it’s always the constantly rebranding or closing businesses because novelty is the main factor

I think we’re drifting out of it but the tapas/small plate places were the vanguard for years. Still remember a douchebag older restauranteur greeting me at his small plates establishment and talking about which waitresses were attractive. It’s the same thing that draws people to talk about cool clubs, where cool means busy and the “right” people milling around

sorry, i’ve feelings

I grew up in DC and it seemed a lot cooler to me when I was in high school than it does when I go back. Dischord bands at Ft Reno and Go-Go music and freestyle cyphers on U Street was what seemed cool about it to me. There's nothing cool about getting a fucking charcuterie board.

one-percenters equals around $400K a year so yeah i may have overplaced him. ten-percenter for sure. but i still think he's mistaking himself and his peers for "cool" and it is always a sad look when ppl try to doll up their condo-construction gentrification of some struggling city as being "cool" because there are now expensive restaurants there.

imo "cool" in the standard sense is what those things replace, a neighborhood that's been slowly somewhat gentrifying but hasn't tipped from "people doing interesting things in areas with low rent/available space" to "all the people who used to live here have been run out and someone knocked over some poor person's housing and built condos"

what's actually cool is neighborhoods that build back up without displacing people, that have businesses owned and run by locals that serve the community. but those are few and far between because rehabilitation isn't the market force that tear down and rebuild is

man alive very much otm, i lived in DC from 2002-2008 that was very much my experience too. seemed like DC cool was actually dying once the target moved into columbia heights and the glass condos started being built. same as anywhere i guess

The clueless GW law professor who wrote this also seems to think moving federal government work to a romanticized heartland is gonna somehow make housing more affordable everywhere, end gentrification, and reduce wage inequality. Superficial and not cool. I'm following him on twitter now (for some reason). He keeps retweeting knuckleheads who liked the article

yea this was one of the dumbest things i've read in a long time

i wonder when the popular cultural normy idea of a hipster is going to be updated from early 00s brooklynite with a beard and waxed mustache to actual modern day hipster norm core/90s type thing that actually exists rn.

I mean this guy hasn't even moved beyond "trucker hat" yet so he's a little behind

trucker hat is literally circa the year 2000 iirc?

The studio across from my wife's had a sticker on the door that said "Foam Free in '03" with a line through a trucker hat, so they were definitely on their way out by 2003.

kind of astounding that some of today's hipsters were literally not born for peak trucker hat

Let’s go back to the important and unprecedented discussion of what “cool” really means, before we decide whether a type of hat was cool at one time

cool is a type of hat, but which type is constantly in question

can't believe people would be indulging in unimportant and precedented discussion of what "cool" really means in the important and unprecedented thread "ROLLING HIPSTER STUDIES 09"

tom really wants us to talk about dc i guess??

moving federal government work to a romanticized heartland

i totally support this policy fwiw

I’m not entirely sure what the policy means

have you actually been to the heartland area, romanticized or not

Moving fed gov't to "the heartland" sounds like code for conservative capture of the bureaucracy.

also for ripping surviving entry-level middle-class positions from minorities.

just move some of the govt there, like few agencies, not the whole Washington DC. idea is to have new cities. a related regional industrial policy i also favour is to have new universities in economically disadvantaged areas, which would sprout cities around them

has anyone pinpointed the exact moment in the last decade when ‘hipster’ switched from meaning foppish cokehead art student to rotund bearded prosumer dad in a flannel shirt? pic.twitter.com/uRSIFgIk4y

— Sam (@fuiud) December 15, 2019

aren't they the same person a decade later