And then posters will no longer have to quibble about hipster vs hippie 
Interesting. Newark is on the PATH line, has a couple of colleges and even a named “up and coming” neighborhood with restaurants and whatnot (The Ironbound).
I’ve heard the same thing about Chapel Hill, another college town (University of North Carolina). Raleigh’s too big to be considered a “college town”, despite the presence of NC State, but it, Chapel Hill, and Durham (Duke) all three host universities and are close enough for a common college town vibe.
Pittsburgh maybe?
My mom relocated from Washington DC to the Black Hills and later to Sundance, WY - it’s in NE WY.
When she left the Black Hills she sent me a card. It had some cowboys looking at some flying saucers in the sky. One was saying, “More Californians, I reckon”.
What we’re looking for here is a few fairly straightforward things for eligibility.
- Relatively high level of education.
- Professional jobs. Media, technology and so forth. Thought jobs.
- Low cost-of-housing
Put those things together and you’re primed for a boom of kidlets looking for their space. I relocated to Charleston, SC almost 10 years ago now (My God) and, while it’s got some things, it just doesn’t qualify. There are the colleges and high education, sure. But cost-of-housing is skyrocketing and the new jobs here are largely solid manufacturing. Boeing, Volvo, Mercedes, Honeywell and such are all making high-end products here and bringing their suppliers with them.
But you don’t get a lot of avocado toast eaters with guys who weld airframes together. You get a lot of BBQ joints, instead.
“Why build a zoo when you could just put a fence around Chapel Hill?” --Jesse Helms, back in the 1970s.
In other words, I don’t think Chapel Hill is in the running :).
Similarly, Asheville and Athens are has-been hipster towns IMO. There’s a little town near Asheville, Sylva, that is building up some cred as where hipsters flee to when they get sick of Asheville’s gentrification. Carrboro is Chapel Hill’s hip little sister.
Beyond those, I dunno. In North Carolina, Wilmington is becoming progressively cooler.
Here’s an article on the 20 most hipster cities. Not sure if being included there means they are not in the “next” category.
Boise is up there in the top 5. Seems like the PNW runs heavy in this area. What is it about that region?
From the same article, here is the hipster index of cities. My city Sacramento made 23rd of 150. I am a little surprised since we have the brewpub thing, the farm-to-fork thing, skyrocketing rents, homeless problems, coffee culture, a university, man-buns, lumbersexuals, scooter rentals and all that.
Outside the USA, I vote for Hamilton, Ontario.
Industrial town that got hollowed out by the decline of the steel industry. Rough and uncute. Been unfashionable (i.e. cheap rent) for so long that the rest of the Greater Toronto Area has kind of forgotten about it, yet it is still on the main train line. Has Mohawk College and McMaster University.
Next up: Oshawa, Ontario, on the other side of the GTA, but it is still in the hollowing-out phase, with the decline of GM. Having lived in South Oshawa, though, I can vouch for the ‘uncute’ part.
Right now this very minute today I’m going to say this is right on the money for Boise, less sure about Provo.
I’m already starting to hear people comparing Boise to Austin these days.
Born in Buffalo, live in Ithaca.
Tompkins County has a predominantly liberal/progressive voter base, two prominent colleges/universities, a huge population of OG 1960s/1070s hippies, a big DIY/locavore/foodie/beer/wine scene, a large LGBTQ population (with a heavy emphasis on the “L”) that nobody thinks twice about, and a lot of boho grit in the built environment. However, it’s “centrally isolated”, with nothing but two lane state roads in and out, a very high cost of living relative to incomes (Upstate salaries, Downstate prices), a severe shortage of quality housing, almost all rental leases tied to the academic cycle, and a dominant back-to-the-land/permie/crunchy culture that holds limited appeal among more urban-leaning Millennials. Ithaca will continue to grow, and it’ll remain an iconic college/crunchy town, but it won’t have widespread appeal as a “cool” city.
Buffalo? Maybe. It’s waking up from its slumber. I return every few months, and the changes every time I go back are dramatic. It’s a medium-sized city, with a metro area a little bit smaller than Austin, Portland, and Nashville when they got “hot”. The Great Recession barely scratched the city, unlike other major Great Lakes metros. There’s a lot of colleges and universities, although only SUNY / University at Buffalo has some prestige outside the area. The airport has a growing number of non-stop destinations. There’s a lot of intact, walkable urban neighborhoods and inner ring suburbs, and bidding wars for housing in those areas are common. On Reddit and local message boards, there’s a growing number of “I’m thinking about moving to Buffalo from X” threads. The region is also culturally quite distinct from the rest of the Northeastern US and Great Lakes region, partly due to its old school ethnic/Catholic/blue collar heritage, and until about 10 years ago, the lack of new blood. The lingering stuck-in-the-1970s blue collar culture is slowly being pushed further out to the suburbs.
During a Congress for the New Urbanism conference in Buffalo a few years ago, I drove some planner friends of mine from Austin around the city. Their jaws were pretty much hanging the whole drive, in an “OH MY GOD THIS IS AMAZING” kind of way. Their impression – Buffalo has all the walkable mixed use neighborhoods, street life, density, and urbanism that Austin lacks. When a bunch of urban planners from Austin think Buffalo is “fucking amazing”, it’s a good sign. I think the idea of Buffalo joining Austin and Portland as “cool”, though, is still a couple of decades away – if it actually happens.
I’ll second that one. Because of all the colleges we’ve always had a somewhat hippy thing going on but now its getting more spread out and a better financial class of hippy. And for being basically a battle-ground liberal city surrounded by Arkansas (if you’ve ever spent time in Fayette-nam you know what I mean) it has always been pretty accepting of darn near anything. Unless you are a minority and running away from the police; in which case all bets are off.
And as an aside; I would say these days Portland OR has Austin beat.
I’d like it to be Portland. Portland, Maine. Just so the rest of the country has to constantly ask for clarification about which Portland people are talking about too.
I came in to this thread and was going to post something about the next Cool City being somewhere in the Rust Belt and… I’ll be damned… Cincinnati is #3. Without digging too deeply, I have to guess that the microbreweries are heavily skewing our index.
In the past 15 years, the former ghetto has transformed into $2m condos, and the neighborhood where all of the food service employees who work in the former ghetto lived until about five years ago is now full of $300k 3-bedroom rehabs. In a city where the median annual household income is about $55k. Still affordable by coastal standards, but now now is definitely not a great time to be a buyer in one of the “cool” neighborhoods.
One big caveat is that we’re not really strong on pure tech jobs, meaning the startup scene is pretty anemic. There isn’t much here in the technology sector that isn’t Procter, Kroger, GE, or financial-services related or adjacent. There are very very few pure startups, and I don’t think we’re going to see the kind of explosive growth that Seattle has experienced in the last 25 years. I’m hoping that keeps a lid on the gentrification and allows some of us to thread the needle between “still cool” vs “has some money.”