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> I contend that it's not even just this, but also that within metros millenials are highly skewed to a handful of elite neighborhoods. In St. Louis there's a

> I contend that it's not even just this, but also that within metros millenials are highly skewed to a handful of elite neighborhoods. In St. Louis there's a small but frothy back-to-the-city movement that's driving prices up to new highs in a handful of trendy neighborhoods. And it's all anybody can talk about. It's a kind of synecdoche for "the housing market" to reference these tiny neighborhoods while using cargo-cult language about "gentrification" that people learned on twitter. Make no mistake: prices are way up in those neighborhoods. But they're walking distance to far more affordable housing. It's really bizarre.

neutronicus 6y ago
Having just been in a similar market (Baltimore): There was gorgeous old architecture to be had on the cheap, if you were okay with a couple crumbling vacants on the block, trash everywhere, poorly rated public schools, overflowing weeds, and frustratingly difficult access to the ostensibly adjoining trendy neighborhood (the ones I was looking at were separated by a half mile with a single cross street, where blocks in each of the neighborhoods are probably 4-500 feet long). When you're shopping for ten years (and not just yourself) you get gun shy about stuff like that
- dionidium 6y ago
  > There was gorgeous old architecture to be had on the cheap, if... St. Louis really punches above its weight in gorgeous old architecture, so there are well-maintained, affordable neighborhoods with pretty old red-brick houses, too, but the real value is to be found in plain working-class neighborhoods where the houses never show up on Instagram. That housing for actual working-class people is unsurprisingly where most working-class St. Louisans live. Of course, nobody who has ever used the word "gentrification" on twitter has any interest in living in any of those neighborhoods, so their existence is rounded down to zero in the discourse. It wasn't that long ago that even the coolest neighborhoods with the best housing stock were wildly undervalued against their fundamentals. And hipster St. Louis isn't thrilled that the secret is out.

neutronicus 6y ago

Having just been in a similar market (Baltimore): There was gorgeous old architecture to be had on the cheap, if you were okay with a couple crumbling vacants on the block, trash everywhere, poorly rated public schools, overflowing weeds, and frustratingly difficult access to the ostensibly adjoining trendy neighborhood (the ones I was looking at were separated by a half mile with a single cross street, where blocks in each of the neighborhoods are probably 4-500 feet long). When you're shopping for ten years (and not just yourself) you get gun shy about stuff like that

dionidium 6y ago
> There was gorgeous old architecture to be had on the cheap, if... St. Louis really punches above its weight in gorgeous old architecture, so there are well-maintained, affordable neighborhoods with pretty old red-brick houses, too, but the real value is to be found in plain working-class neighborhoods where the houses never show up on Instagram. That housing for actual working-class people is unsurprisingly where most working-class St. Louisans live. Of course, nobody who has ever used the word "gentrification" on twitter has any interest in living in any of those neighborhoods, so their existence is rounded down to zero in the discourse. It wasn't that long ago that even the coolest neighborhoods with the best housing stock were wildly undervalued against their fundamentals. And hipster St. Louis isn't thrilled that the secret is out.