The frontiersmen come in living 4 to a studio and working as baristas while doing art in their spare time, then comes the hipsters calling the cops on their neighbors because they don't feel safe etc etc, then once they move in, the yuppies follow suit..rinse and repeat. It's like Manifest Destiny...
Here are some good reads if you're interested.
Abstract The inauguration of Ronald Reagan as President of the United States and his economic policy, nicknamed "Reaganomics," which in part deregulated the stock market, brought about great social change in the U.S. during the 1980s (Niskanen). The change is exemplified in Manhattan with the emergence of the Wall Street yuppie culture. Newsweek dubbed 1984 the Year of the Yuppie (Girard 168). Manhattan became the new urban frontier, where the yuppies, confined to Upper Manhattan, were trying to conquer other neighborhoods by marginalizing the middle and lower classes; these actions are similar to early Americans who, believing in Manifest Destiny, set out to expand the United States' border to reach the Pacific Ocean. Men led the first frontier advancement and their masculinity was defined relative to boyhood according to social interactions like family relations, friendships, employment, and romantic relationships. With the close of the frontier in 1890, men were encouraged to partake in and support U.S. imperialism, conquering new (and foreign) frontiers (Rotundo 235). When compared, although time and technological advances distinguish the period following the North American frontier and the 1980s, the conceptions of masculinity of both the imperialist frontiersmen and the yuppies of the 80s were defined using "military ideals" (Rotundo 235). In Jay McInerney's novel Bright Lights, Big City (1984) and Bret Easton Ellis's novel American Psycho (1992), we see one male character who fails to live up to yuppie ideals of masculinity and one male character who emerges as the embodiment of those ideals and conquers the new urban frontier.
http://louisianadigitallibrary.org/islandora/object/uno-p15140coll7:126
It is the establishment that now sees the hipster as the embodiment of autonomous, small-scale capitalist expansionism. But it is not just the hipster cast in this role. Artists are the neoliberal state’s troops. Artists make the first move into post-industrial, post-welfare state wastelands like brownfield sites and council housing estates and sow the seeds of cultural capital. They attract hipsters before, eventually, being displaced by them and their new middle-class neighbours. Both the artists and (some) of the hipsters – the ones who haven’t “settled” yet – will move on, exploring, breaking away (again), developing new potential sites for capital “investment”. And so the cycle of gentrification starts over again.
Hipsters and artists are the gentrifying foot soldiers of capitalism | Stephen Pritchard
I learned a lot about this in my property law class. Thanks Prof. McDougall. .
