Hold on to your warm PBR cans. According to a real estate blog that took into account, among other factors, young people, dive bars and vegetarian restaurants in the 30 most populous cities in America, Charlotte is the sixth least hipster.
According to movoto.com:
To create a list of the least hipster cities, we first needed to get inside the mind of your average hipster. We scoured the Internet and swapped stories, and came up with a list of criteria that cities needed to become hipster havens. Once we figured out what these criteria were, we turned our findings on its head.
So, they took into account how much of the following was in a city: young people, walkability, bikeability, vintage stores, dive bars, vegetarian restaurants, artsy jobs and vinyl stores.
Five Texas cities made the top 10, including El Paso, Fort Worth, Houston, San Antonio and Dallas.
Read the results here.
This article appears in Mar 20-26, 2013.
I think there are several other similar size cities that seem “less hipster” than us: Indianapolis, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Tampa, Jacksonville…
But by their criteria I guess yeah, we don’t have shit for vintage stores and record stores, and our design community (as a barometer of one category of ‘artsy’ jobs I can attest to) is embarrassingly smaller than that of Winston Salem or Durham.
Charlotte is a growing city. I recognize that the art/design/hipster scene is, as the previous poster aptly described it, “embarrassingly small” at the moment. But I also feel like Charlotte has so many transplants coming into the city that the traditional way of life is bound to change here. I moved here in August, and I’ve met many, many people since then, but I could count on one hand the number of native Charlotteans I know. I choose to view this as a good thing. I believe this city has a lot of potential. There’s enough room for bankers AND hipsters. 🙂
Pittsburgh is rising up as East Portland…dummy.
It’s funny, rumbraves comment about lesser hip cities is quite the coincidence with me. I’ve lived in all 4 of those other cities and Tampa, Pittsburgh, and especially Cleveland have a TON more to offer than Charlotte. Cleveland for example is one of the best culinary and art cities in the country (this is a widely accepted fact). On the other hand, they are right about Jacksonville. That city is still backwoods and lost somewhere about 50 years ago. Probably the worst downtown of any so called city I’ve ever even been to, let alone lived in.
Fair enough, I guess I didn’t see the right parts of those cities. However I stated that my metric was a very unscientific one based on my impressions of a place, and I don’t REALLY think “hipsterism” is adequately gauged by number of vintage stores and dive bars. Its a word that has almost lost all meaning because people freely apply it to anyone under 30 with the slightest bit of quirk to them.
Hipster implies a level of grunginess and culture which Charlotte just does not have. You can find it don’t get me wrong. But you reaaaaallllly have to look for it here. Anyone who really disagrees has never left the city.
I am moving to North Carolina in November. I am eager and somewhat desperate to find an art scene that I can fit in to. It seems alot of what Charlotte considers art is extremely tame and not very expressive compared to the galleries and artists I know in Los Angeles. I hope to go out there and meet some self expressive artists like myself.