Bike Snob - Anonymous [36]
People debate endlessly about gentrification being a good thing or a bad thing. Pro-gents say that gentrification brings safety, and amenities (if you call high-end clothing boutiques and places that sell truffle oil “amenities”), and increases the value of the neighborhood’s real estate for everybody. Anti-gents say that gentrification raises rents, forces out people with lower incomes, and creates a breeding ground for the ever-growing Nation of Smug Hipsters.
Truth be told, both the pro-gents and the anti-gents make good points. And one thing that’s become an increasingly important part of gentrification, for better or for worse, is the bicycle. The hipster is a particular breed of person, and where there are hipsters, there are bicycles (usually, but not always, fixed-gears). And a hipster on a bicycle can spread gentrification more quickly than a stiff wind can distribute a cloud of ragweed pollen. Yes, hipsters on bicycles can cause entire cities to suffer from the itchy eyes and sneezing of trendiness.
So why is bicycle-borne trendiness so much more virulent than other forms? Well, to understand this, first we must understand the living habits and migratory patterns of the hipster. Hipsters like to live near other hipsters, so at first their presence is quite localized. Traditionally, if limited to public transportation, hipsters will leave their territory to forage for work or to engage in recreation and mating, but they will always return to their territory and will only expand it as far as they can conveniently walk. Hipsters also occasionally embrace certain motorized forms of transport, such as Vespa scooters, vintage mopeds, and café racer—style motorcycles. However, those too keep the hipster localized, as they are seldom reliable. When they are actually running, hipsters opt to travel as far on them as they can, and it’s not worth the forty-five minutes it can sometimes take to kick-start a recalcitrant Triumph Bonneville simply to ride to a bar the next neighborhood over. They can also require considerable expense to maintain. And as far as cars go, those are generally graduation presents, and hipsters usually return those to their parents when they realize they can’t afford to pay their parking tickets.
Another important fact about the hipsters is that kleptoparasitism is an essential component of their survival technique. Kleptoparasitism is when one animal steals another’s prey or nesting materials. Take, for example, the hipster bar, which is usually just a copy of a dive bar and contains decorations taken from actual dive bars, and only differs in that the drink prices all have an extra digit in them. Also, much like the blue jay or the black-headed grosbeak will steal stuff from other birds’ nests, hipsters will forage for discarded or unattended bits of kitsch that they will then bring back to their lofts or renovated tenement apartments. Most significantly, hipsters kleptoparasitize their vintage band T-shirts, haircuts, and tattoos from other types of humans in order to make themselves attractive to other hipsters. With the shants of a mailman, the knuckle tattoos of a prisoner, and the haircut of a young Rod Stewart, the hipster kleptoparasite walks the streets of his habitat like a mating lizard with his throat pouch engorged.
So once the bicycle became trendy, the migratory pattern of the hipster changed. Because the bicycle is by far the simplest and fastest way to cover short distances, cycling hipsters soon explored the often fertile areas surrounding their territory. These were areas that they never noticed on public transportation, or that seemed hopelessly far away by foot. However, what may be half an hour away by foot is only ten minutes away by bicycle, and even the most feeble hipster can ride a bicycle for ten minutes. Emboldened, hipsters discovered new lands and started to settle in territories they had previously dismissed as uninhabitable. They also kleptoparasitized those neighborhoods, adding new style elements to their metaphorical mating pouches. (The