'American cities are booming - for rich young college grads without kids'

I think this all the time: Chicago, the city I grew up coming to, doesn't really exist any more. It's just a yuppie playground now. The Brooklyn/San Francisco - two other cities that have essentially been culturally built-over - of the Midwest.

I find it sad. My brother - a well-off young college grad without kids - loves it. So do my co-workers.

American Cities Are Booming—For Rich Young College Grads Without Kids

 

Nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded. Look, eventually those people will hook up and start families. Then they will either remake their neighborhoods (as has happened in Los Feliz in LA, you never saw so many hipsters with strollers and standing at school bus stops), or they'll move to the suburbs. When I first came to Boston, the near suburb Arlington was all long-time Irish and Italian families. Now it's younger, more affluent, has a thriving school system, a lot more cultural and ethnic diversity and all in all has improved greatly. The old line families sold their homes for a big profit and moved down the Cape or to Fort Myers. They're happy, the new families are happy, so what's the beef?
I heard a guy on the radio about six months ago. He divided cities into destination cities, like Boston and Chicago, and opportunity cities, citing Jacksonville and Houston, which are attracting population, particularly various minorities, because housing was affordable even for lower middle class incomes. Makes sense. Maybe Hondo will live to see Jacksonville become the next hipster paradise.

 

I go back and forth on who is more annoying, the frat bros and other assorted douchebags who have turned San Francisco into what it is, or the people (Yelp gurl!) who believe they have some divine right to be there because they're poor.

 

A few years ago my wife and I met a couple who'd lived in Seattle for a time -- he was a muckety-muck in finance for Microsoft, as I recall -- and per them they got out of there because of the bad vibes they picked up regarding their having three (maybe four, I don't remember) sons. The wife said their casual acquaintances, ignorant of their family situation, would bitch about "breeders" mucking up everything. At the time I figured it was all overblown, but after I visited there this fall I realized they might not have been all that off-base.

 

Babies are accessories.

 

I've heard the term "fuck trophies" thrown around in San Francisco.

It's the only place I've ever actually felt uncomfortable taking my kids to a restaurant -- not a fancy place at all, but the kind patrons stared daggers at us nonetheless. Which was odd because for once our kids were pretty well behaved.

 

Screw them. They're so self-righteous they forget that they were once kids; that's my attitude and I'm sticking to it. Did/do I take my kids to the Ritz for dinner? No (I keep those to my client dinners); I take them to basic places and yeah it stunk when the childless acted so put off.

Was talking to someone in my gen today and we said, most importantly, what about that $16 trillion debt? How are they going to pay for it?

SF in the 70's when I was a kid, and even the 80's and 90's when I was in law school, had many family neighborhoods. Sadly, its very much lost that flavor (and my parents moved there to retire).

 

Our last night in Seattle, my wife and I ate at the restaurant associated with the hotel. It was one of the more insane meals I've ever had -- we literally had a bowl of soup and a glass of wine each, and our bill (sans tip) was $112. I couldn't quit laughing.

The other we're-not-in-Texas thing was the table across the way from us, at which there were two couples (both hetero, one couple with a child). The couple without the child was almost a cliche: Both slim, he with the shirt-collar-buttoned-to-the-neck look, she with a Peter Pan collared blouse. The couple with the child was almost a cliche, too, but of a different sort. He was doing kind of a gangsta thing, with the grey hoodie that he wore over his head throughout the meal. I don't recall how she was dressed, but she was rather short and stout, with this crazy (to me) hairstyle. Most of her head was almost completely shaved (there was just a fraction of an inch of stubble) but on the very top she had this patch of hair that was two, three inches tall, jelled up stiff as a board. OF COURSE she had the "Look how hip I am" horn-rimmed glasses. The kid was just your normal, run-of-the-mill ragamuffin. I'm sure he trotted off to some Montessori academy during the week, but mom and dad kept him occupied during dinner the same way mom and dad would have had they been in Flyover City, Kansas: They gave him the cell phone.

 

My brother is definitely one of these people. He went nuclear on me at his wedding because my kid's jacket got dirty. He had leaned against a wall.

 

I can't be the only one around here who remembers that term being thrown around by an angry sj.commer.

Help me out, old-timers.

 

Was it in regards to Bob Geldolf's daughter?

What was her name again?

 

Dick, presumably your brother will have a kid or two and then he'll understand. My children are 31 and 27 and they and their closest friends and peers are getting deep into the period where they realize life is so damn complicated. They'll get through it, just as most folks with goodwill and a lick of sense do.