Bad Reputation

Post mishap yesterday. Personal blog here. Idea blog on personal blog. Here is the real post:

Neighborhood are constantly losing their own character because hipsters are moving in. Makes sense right? Prices are low, hipsters are poor and artistic. Been happening for ages I know. But I'd like to start thinking about this as part of the movement of something like global capitalism. The hipsters are just the vangaurd, those willing to live a little dirtier, a little poorer. And so they pave the way for the real corp-whores who invevitably fill a place with walmarts of a higher class.

That was me stating a problem. This is me answering it in one potential way.

I've had some ideas before about places going for tourism in order to preserve their culture. Today I'm going on the alternate tack. That is, places cultivate and promote their own bad reputations to keep people away. Now I don't mean that they should acutally be bad, but you know, really sell the dirt and crime and filth. Even have like a reverse tourism agent with plans about how to spread the word about the badness.

That way, people will tend to avoid the area and the area can continue to be the area. Take the Mission and the Tenderlion. Both are in various states of bad. But the vanguard has totally moved into the Mission and made it infinitely more safe for the non-vanguard. What if ten years ago the Mission got together and started working on its own problems and meanwhile made sure to tell everyone that it was still a pretty dangerous place? And the Tenerloin? Still in that awful, awful place. But money is moving in. And what is there to do? Promote, not that it is getting better, but that it is just as unsafe.

Perhaps bad examples. But I think we need some natural animal defenses against all becoming white bread.