Business Insider’s Melia Robinson has made an amazing discovery: the Mission is very hip. Hipper than Brooklyn, even. It is also changing.
It’s easy to roll one’s eyes at ingenuous analysis like that. (“And have you ever heard of the French Quarter?”) Equally alluring is the impulse to cut it some slack, because this is coming from some stodgy economics site, not Lucky Peach, right? But Business Insider is actually plugged-in and full of Gawker alums, so this naïveté is startling even when you factor in the occasional parochialism of New York media.
The piece started out even more breathless, too. As Uptown Almanac noted, the headline was changed from “San Francisco’s Mission District is a Million Times More Hipster Than Brooklyn” to the duller and wordier “The Tech Boom Turned This Working-Class San Francisco Neighborhood into a Hipster Haven.” If anything, the real fault in the original wasn’t the snub of S.F.’s ego, but to Brooklyn — which is actually a massive, hyper-diverse borough of 2.5 million people (2.2 million of whom definitely aren’t hipsters), and not a lone neighborhood of 50,000.
I’m going to resist the impulse to nitpick to excess, because even though the tone sounds a little like my dad encountering grasshopper tacos for the first time (hypothetically speaking), this was not a half-assed effort. Robinson put sweat equity into it, talked to a bunch of people, and refrained from any gratuitous, Yelp-style phantom-hipster-punching. OK, she didn’t seem to walk south of 20th Street, but still.
So let’s the re-sheath the long knives and put the best possible spin on this. People are still discovering the Mission, and they like what they see. In spite of the partial collapse of Valencia’s restaurant dominance and the $7500 apartments, someone actually wrote something that wasn’t suffused with melancholy for everything that’s gone. A journalist actually wrote an agenda-free article that didn’t turn into a black-and-white, existentialist treatise on why the Mission is a microcosm of everything that’s wrong with America. Isn’t that actually kind of refreshing?
[Via Business Insider, photo by Potential Past/Flickr]
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