The revitalization of cities seemed to come out of nowhere, but you write that it was actually the result of deliberate efforts and policies. For instance, Chicago laid the groundwork for a resurgence, while other Midwestern cities missed out. What did Chicago do that, say, Cleveland did not?

In Chicago’s case there were two factors: One is that Chicago is simply the biggest, so it inherits the title of Magnet City of the Midwest. That gave it an edge. But it’s just as true that Mayor Daley the First had a clear idea that people would want to live downtown, and he made it possible for developers to acquire land there. Similarly to what New York City and Philadelphia did, he offered tax incentives to help the city center come back. Now, you can waste a lot of money on tax incentives if no one wants to live downtown. The market has to be right.

Of course, the flip side is more immigrants and working-class families now living in the suburbs, which has complicated politics in places like Gwinnett County, a suburb of Atlanta, because all these different immigrant groups have a harder time uniting on issues. Are we looking at a future of the ungovernable suburb?

Gwinnett County is interesting because the residents are now a nonwhite majority, yet it’s still all white Republicans on the council. It’s fairly common for a traditional white power structure to remain when diversity comes in. In Chicago, you had an Irish power structure in neighborhoods long after they became majority black. But yes, one myth is that Asians are Asians when it comes to politics, but each ethnic group is different, politically speaking. And another thing that’s clear is that African-Americans and Hispanics go their separate ways — the immigrants tend not to move into the African-American areas.

The suburbs themselves break down into different factions, too. You’ve got the outer suburbs, like Gwinnett County, which are seeing a true inversion, and the inner suburbs, which often still suffer from high poverty and high crime. I would think that as the inner cores of cities become more and more expensive, these inner-ring suburbs would inevitably gentrify completely. Is that too simple an assumption?

I think it’s a little too simple. The prewar inner suburbs — the Chevy Chases [in Maryland], the Brooklines [in Massachusetts] — those will do fine. But the ones built after the war, where the housing stock is smaller, those are going to be difficult to gentrify.

Right, I was fascinated to learn how small the houses were in Levittown on Long Island, the most famous postwar suburb.

Levittown houses were tiny. You don’t see many remnants of the original houses there anymore. Today, the average suburban house size has gone from 1,000 square feet to a little over 2,000 square feet.

Transit has benefited greatly from the Great Inversion — ridership has surged in many cities. Why has gentrification led to increased ridership? It’s not as if working-class people don’t take the train.

I think the boost comes from leisure travel. You have gentrified neighborhoods to which people are going on weekends and evenings. And while they have a fair number of commuters, most of the cities that have developed light rail are seeing large amounts of non-business-related travel on those lines, too. I think it’s also important to make the point that development comes in once the tracks go in. Once you lay down light rail, developers begin to have confidence that this is a neighborhood where you can invest.

This whole idea of a Great Inversion has its naysayers, people who think the shift is temporary and the suburbs will be ascendant again once the economy picks up. Obviously you think that’s not the case.

I don’t think [the Great Inversion] is 100 percent guaranteed by any means. Nor do I think tens of thousands of people now living in the exurbs are going to head for the inner city. What’s more likely to happen is that Generation Y will show a preference for urban living. Now, that might mean “urban living” outside city limits. There’s simply a limit to how many people can live in the city, and at times there will be more demand than supply. So urbanizing the suburbs, creating a city out of a piece of suburbia, creating town centers, grids, that could make up the difference.

Could that, in turn, make the exurbs the new suburbs, residing on the edges of these newly urbanized towns? Many exurbs have been struggling because of foreclosures, high gas prices, etc. If today’s suburbs urbanize, could that help revitalize them?

I think some of the exurbs may stay vital, but many of the people who will move to them will be immigrants and the lower-middle class. What you’re not going to see is a mass movement of wealthy people to the exurbs. That’s not going to happen.

Should we feel upset or angry about the Great Inversion? It seems like we’re talking about the mass displacement of millions of people. Or are we talking about everyone getting what they want: wealthy people getting to move to urban cores, and immigrants finally getting a shot at a lawn and a two-car garage?

I look at it as an expansion of choice. We went through most of the postwar period where there wasn’t a choice to live in the inner city if you had money, and there wasn’t a choice to live in the suburbs if you didn’t. There were just too many factors working against it. Now people who want to live 40 miles out can live 40 miles out, and there’s more opportunity for people to live in the inner city, too.

But it may not last. The smart-city movement is at a crossroads. With the market projected to be worth $16 billion by the end of the decade, big companies like IBM and Cisco have much grander — and more profitable — ambitions than these small-scale projects. They’re going all-in on smart cities, with designs that supposedly do everything from end traffic jams to prevent disease outbreaks to eliminate litter. “Almost anything — any person, any object, any process or any service, for any organization, large or small — can become digitally aware and networked,” said IBM Chairman Samuel J. Palmisano at the 2010 SmarterCities forum in Shanghai. “Think about the prospect of a trillion connected and instrumented things —cars, appliances, cameras, roadways, pipelines …”

Indeed, the goal of these companies is not just to participate in the evolution of smart cities, but to connect and control virtually everything with massive operating systems that will run these cities in their entirety. “Everybody wants to be the architects of these systems because then you own them forever,” says Greg Lindsay, author of “Aerotropolis” and an urban-technology reporter for Fast Company. “You could say it’s sort of a land grab.”

Which of these futures should smart cities shoot for — the bottom-up model or the top-down version? A few weeks ago, Lindsay and Anthony Townsend of the Institute for the Future debated just that question. It’s easy to feel a knee-jerk reaction against the top-down, evil-corporate-overlord schema, but it has some things going for it. Rio de Janeiro is perhaps the closest thing the world currently has to a top-down smart city. Two years ago, IBM built an enormous, Mission Control-like facility for Rio, from which emergency services, transit, traffic, air quality, weather, contagious disease outbreaks, landslides and just about everything else is now monitored and managed. “Eighty interchangeable digital panels project live video feeds from 450 cameras,” is how the Daily Beast described it, “plus a dizzying array of tricked-out Google Maps of schools and hospitals, car accidents … and close to 10,000 GPS-tracked buses and ambulances.”

It’s an undeniably nimble and efficient method (assuming the system doesn’t crash), and will come in handy when Rio hosts both the Olympics and the World Cup in the next four years. But it also consolidates power in the executive branch and creates an unsettling scope of surveillance. Its greatest novelty, however, may be that the system effectively puts a corporation, IBM, partially at the helm of a city of 6 million people.

“It has something like 70 different city departments under it,” says Lindsay of Rio’s system. “You create this entanglement where IBM almost becomes part of the city government. You couldn’t untangle it if you wanted to.”

Not to mention the fact that IBM is a computer company, not an urban planning consultancy. In his debate with Lindsay, Townsend asserted that the companies vying for smart-city dominance “know nothing about cities.” In fact, he said, despite having one of the biggest smart-city divisions in the IT world, IBM just hired its first urban planner last year. Why so little interest in what makes cities tick? “That’s probably the whole arrogance of the technology culture,” said Lindsay. “I think the software industry sees urban government as having failed.” Their attitude is: “‘We will come into your city and we will fix it.’”

It sounds, frankly, like Robert Moses all over again. New York’s “master planner” was notoriously uninterested in conforming his grand designs to urban nuances, with terrible consequences. Which is why the other way to approach smart cities, from the bottom up — referred to, naturally, as the Jane Jacobs method — is not only less risky, but holds vastly more potential.

“I always go back to the fundamental question of what cities are for, and what they do for us for free if we let them,” says Adam Greenfield, managing director of Urbanscale, an urban-technology consultancy. Rather than looking at cities as things that need to be be “fixed” by a distant force from on high, he sees technology as a tool to enhance a city’s existing strengths — starting with its residents themselves. “I go back to a book I read called ‘The Uses of Disorder,’ which suggests that cities are about maximizing interface between you and others,” says Greenfield. “You’re connected to a variety of people and providing the city itself with information and insights.”

A great example of maximizing the urban interface is SeeClickFix, an online platform that lets people report local infrastructure problems, from leaky hydrants to dangerous intersections. Other users can then “Like” those reports, Facebook-style, so city administrators can see which projects their citizens consider most urgent. It also saves local government the expense of monitoring every square foot of the city by itself.

There are other examples of bottom-up smart city thinking. In Seattle, 500 residents attached electronic trackers to pieces of their trash so that the items could be followed through the sanitation system to pinpoint inefficiencies. In Singapore, a group from MIT is developing a website that will show real-time movements of in-demand urban amenities, like cabs during rush hour. And a New York designer named Leif Percifield is prototyping a solution to his city’s combined-sewage overflow problem, in which thousands of gallons of raw sewage are dumped into the rivers when it rains. It would cost untold millions for the city to fix this problem; instead, Percifield is placing sensors in the sewers that will detect when the overflow is happening, so residents, who can opt to be automatically notified, can choose not to flush their toilets till the overflow has stopped.

Greenfield admits that these could be seen as a raw deal, government shunting its responsibilities onto the people. “But looked at from another perspective,” he says, “it’s empowering.” It’s a bit like how Twitter has become a place where people get their news — sure, a media company could have built and run a similar system itself, but on Twitter we send the links around for free, and gladly.

The common thread in all of these solutions is data, and much of it already exists, just waiting to be grabbed. “Your iPhone has eight sensors on it,” says Lindsay. “Think about the number of iPhones per city.” Cellphone signals, tracked en masse and anonymously, could be used to reorient transit service toward where it’s most needed, and to see how many people are visiting a city’s parks. It’s no more Big Brother-like than what already exists — the government can and does access cellphone location data all the time — so why not put that data to work for the benefit of cities?

Lindsay sees a day when the smart city has become so sentient that we can choose to have our phones make us aware of people in our immediate vicinity who would be advantageous for us to meet. A smart city could eliminate unused office space with a system that allows us to seamlessly share occupancy with strangers whose paths we never actually cross. In the future, we may even marvel that there was a time when cars sat unused 95 percent of the day.

“The city is already smart,” says Greenfield. “The intelligence is just bound up in the actions and behaviors of its users. If we harness that intelligence, we win.”

Next week: A look at the new smart cities that are being constructed from scratch, their place in the future of urbanism, and what our current cities can learn from them.

To see this shift in action, look no further than the site of Jacobs’ most famous battle, Greenwich Village. Fifty years ago, a high-rise urban-renewal project threatened to eviscerate the neighborhood. But local activists successfully quashed it, and the Village, now one of Manhattan’s most desirable neighborhoods, has enjoyed historic designation since 1969. The protected area has been expanded twice recently, in 2006 and 2010, and last month, the Preservation League of New York State recommended expanding it once again. The latest expansion would encompass clubs where Bob Dylan and Lenny Bruce once offended upper-crust sensibilities — which is funny, since the average Greenwich Village apartment now sells for upward of $2 million.

In that outrageous figure, you can see the root of the current backlash against historic districts. When Jacobs’ neighborhood was protected in 1969, it was no tony enclave. In fact, the justification for the urban-renewal project was that Greenwich Village was allegedly a slum. But now that the Village is wealthy, suddenly there are three expansions of its protective boundaries in six years. The timing invites cynical conclusions, bluntly summed up by urbanist Alon Levy on his blog last year: “Let us remember what historic districts are, in practice: They are districts where wealthy people own property that they want to prop up the price of.”

Restricting development in pricey neighborhoods, the new thinking goes, not only cements a city’s best sections as enclaves for the rich, it has wider anti-urban reverberations. It promotes suburbanization by pricing out the middle class. It prevents densification, the greenest, most efficient use of space and the defining characteristic of cities. And less density makes walkable, retail- and transit-oriented neighborhoods harder to sustain (though admittedly, this would never be a problem in a place like the Village, which is already far denser than most cities.)

It’s arguments like these that are pushing the usually planning-oriented New Urbanist crowd toward unlikely allies, like free-marketer Edward Glaeser, when it comes to historic districts. Glaeser was a speaker at last year’s annual meeting of the Congress for the New Urbanism, where he advocated for his trademark belief that density trumps preservation. “They impede new construction,” Glaeser wrote in a manifesto against historic districts in 2010, “keeping real estate in New York City enormously expensive … especially in its most desirable, historically protected areas.”

Glaeser’s research showed that condo prices in such districts rose faster than average over three decades, and that their residents grew richer and whiter than the surrounding city. Other economists have asserted that historic districts “squeeze the balloon” — by restricting the amount of housing in fancier parts of the city, more fancy people must move outward, displacing poorer residents. Even Jane Jacobs acknowledged the importance of density. “Densities are too low, or too high, when they frustrate city diversity instead of abetting it,” she wrote in “The Death and Life of Great American Cities.”

If anything, today it’s the preservationist who is accused as promoting suspiciously suburban-ish values: low-density housing, exclusive enclaves, aesthetics over practicality. But it’s hard to believe that Greenwich Village, as it currently exists, could be “anti-urban” in any way. Isn’t it exactly what many of us picture when we think of the ideal city neighborhood?

Roberta Brandes Gratz says the market itself shows that people like these neighborhoods as they are, an argument people like Glaeser should love. “Isn’t it interesting that the Trumps of the world fight to build these new monstrosities on the periphery of the historic districts?” says Gratz, a member of the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission until 2010. “They want the value that comes with building on the periphery of a traditional urban district, but they don’t want the rules. They want the benefit but they don’t want the burden.” Gratz doesn’t buy the argument that taller buildings necessarily lead to more density, either. “When they build these luxury condos they either have huge apartments or people are buying two and combining them.”

Technically, New Urbanist theory is agnostic on the age of buildings — more important is that neighborhoods be dense, walkable, mixed-use and transit-accessible. And Gratz argues that historic districts preserve many of these qualities. “There’s variety, a sense of place, street life, a mixture of uses,” she says. “When you develop a new place, you get Battery Park City,” Manhattan’s unloved outpost of sterile skyscrapers.

Furthermore, old buildings have tangible benefits. “The greenest building is the one you don’t have to build,” says preservation architect Jeffrey Chusid. He says historic districts yield high-paying jobs as well, since old houses require skilled labor. “When you have to teach people to repair and restore windows, you’re creating more local jobs than if you buy windows from a factory in China,” he says.

Chusid is a proponent of the idea that historic districts can benefit working-class people. He points to the Main Street Program in Texas, which aims to revitalize cities’ declining downtowns. “It’s focused on economic development but uses preservation as one of its tools,” he says. Chusid has also written about a working-class historic district in Austin, Texas, whose protected status has helped prevent speculative land grabs.

But perhaps the biggest argument for preservation is also the one that sounds the wishy-washiest: People just like old buildings, from brownstones in New York to Victorians in San Francisco. Even Emily Washington, a writer for the libertarian website MarketUrbanism.com, admits they appeal to her, despite herself. “I like historic districts,” she says. “But I think it’s important to look at the cost of preservation as well as the benefits.”

That cost-benefit analysis is tough to pull off. In hindsight, the benefits of saving Greenwich Village from urban renewal in the ’60s ended up outweighing the costs. Today, the neighborhood is tremendously loved and as far from being a “slum” as possible. It’s also a refuge for the wealthy, however, and could house many more people than it currently does. But maybe the biggest problem with expanding the Village’s protected boundaries now is that, in the words of social theorist David Harvey, Manhattan is becoming the world’s biggest gated community. Taking steps that will likely make it even pricier could keep its real estate eclectic, but in the process, help make its diversity a thing of the past.

Manny Roth remembers when such diversity — of races, incomes and general freakishness — infused the Village back in the ’50s and ’60s, when he owned Cafe Wha? and the Bitter End. Both venues would fall within the expanded preservation zone if the proposal goes through. Roth (uncle of Van Halen’s David Lee) is now 93 and lives in California. But he remembers those days well, when he gave a young man named Bob Dylan, who had just breezed into town, a chance to perform three songs on his tiny stage, as well as Jimi Hendrix, Bruce Springsteen and others who would become legends. “If you go to Cafe Wha? today, my floor is still there, I laid it myself,” says Roth, who lived in the club when he first opened it, bathing in the bathroom sink.

Perhaps surprisingly, when told that the city is considering landmarking the area that includes his old clubs, Roth is unsentimental. “What do I care?” he says. “I’m 93 years old. I have my memories.” Wouldn’t he like to see the city preserve the place where those memories were formed? “Look, most of the greats came from the Village. Cafe Au Go Go was where Lenny Bruce played. Circle in the Square. Le Figaro. The Village Gate. How good does it get? I understand why they want to save it. But that was then.”

It wasn’t just buildings — it was a moment in history. “I was in the right place at the right time,” he says.

Such a dispassionate attitude, divorced from nostalgia and personal wealth concerns, could ease the process of deciding what to save and what to leave to the whims of capitalism. Landmarking is meant to preserve structures whose loss would be an affront to history. Removing entire neighborhoods from the natural evolution of cities is another thing entirely.

With gas taxes, we make the same mistake: We artificially depress the price of fuel so that the least efficient way to get somewhere — in this case, a private car — is also sometimes the cheapest.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has given us an opportunity to discuss this absurdity. On Tuesday, the New York Times revealed the true reason he killed plans for a new rail tunnel from New York to New Jersey. Yes, he was genuflecting before Tea Party deficit hawks, but, said the paper, the decision was actually “more about avoiding the need to raise the state’s gasoline tax.”

Washington gets some flak (not nearly enough) for not raising the federal gas tax. The last time it budged, a T-Rex was chasing Jeff Goldblum, and Meat Loaf was in the Top 40. But individual states are just as guilty of keeping their gas taxes frozen, which, because of inflation, effectively adds up to more deeply discounted gas every year. Fourteen states haven’t raised their gas taxes in at least two decades, including New Jersey, which now has the nation’s third-lowest rate — it hasn’t gone up since 1988. This has caused the state’s real-dollar gas-tax revenue to fall by 40 percent. By not keeping the tax apace with transportation costs, New Jersey loses half a billion dollars a year.

When we talk about the federal gas tax being too low, we talk about the fact that keeping the price of gas down encourages sprawl and discourages sales of fuel-efficient cars — both worthy concerns. But by ignoring the problem of states refusing to raise their rates as well, we miss out on the fact that, for instance, New Jersey’s Transportation Trust Fund is now $12.5 billion in debt. Wyoming last year voted down an attempt to raise its gas tax, the country’s second-lowest, which would have allowed it to repair underground storage tanks that are leaking petroleum into the earth. And South Carolina, which borrowed $52 million from Washington last year to close a budget gap created by its super-low gas tax, recently moved to cut that tax by 10 percent more.

And why not? Gas is expensive now, right? The truth is, the price of gas is unnaturally low, held down by governors who would sooner take a handout from Washington than increase the price by a penny per gallon. This thinking is creating a fiscal disaster for state governments. And it’s put New Jersey on track to earn a dubious distinction: By mid-century, it will become the first state in America to literally run out of land. By making “drive till you qualify” so cheap, all the Garden State’s unprotected open space will be completely gone in a few short decades.

Maybe it’s best if we just drive around it.

Los Angeles is superficial

Sun-baked idiots who care more about Beemers and boob jobs than culture and current events. That’s how we think of Los Angeles, but it more aptly describes a more God-fearing locale: Salt Lake City, which has the most plastic surgeons per capita, Googles the phrase “breast implants” with alarming frequency, and spends more money on both cars and cosmetic procedures than any other city in the nation.

How the Mormon mecca became a nip-tuck town is a bit of a mystery — one theory is that moms here tend to be younger, which leads to more “mommy makeovers.” And though it’s tempting to assume they spend more on their cars because they need snow-friendly SUVs, cities like Denver and Albany, N.Y., spend far less on theirs.

Point being, Los Angeles doesn’t deserve its superficial rep any more than lots of other cities. Washingtonians blow more money on clothes. Atlanta gets more hair transplants. New Orleans watches more TV. And of the 50 biggest cities, L.A. has the 11th most college degrees per square mile. “As someone who’s lived in both New York and D.C., I can say with certainty that Los Angeles is no more shallow than either of those two cities, both of which are considered to be loci for deep and thoughtful people,” says Cord Jefferson, staffer at Los Angeles-based Good Magazine. “Shallow people live everywhere, and there’s not a surplus of them in L.A.”

Boston sports fans are fanatics

Lots of stats support this, but one blew our minds: Despite having the league’s highest ticket prices, the last Red Sox game that didn’t sell out was played in 2003. The 712-game sellout streak has become baseball legend, and it’s well earned — a full one-third of the city attends a Boston pro-sports event every year. As such, the city’s rabid fan base is seen as an advertising gold mine. A marketing study of 81 cities pegged Boston’s pro-sports fans as the nation’s most passionate, with two-thirds identifying as “avid.” Brand Keys Inc., a company that studies customer engagement, compiles an annual Sports Fan Loyalty Index, and only Boston’s teams regularly make the top five in all of the major pro-sports categories.

As stereotypes go, this one’s well deserved. Somehow we doubt they’ll mind the label.

New York drivers are nuts

New Yorkers have a reputation for driving like they’re being chased by a tidal wave. But by the numbers, New York motorists appear to be less dangerous than those in several other cities. According to Allstate Insurance, drivers in Philadelphia, Washington and Los Angeles suffer more collisions per capita. And Orlando, Fla., drivers kill far more pedestrians (though pedestrian-unfriendly infrastructure surely plays a part in this).

So why the sense of mayhem? New York City cab driver Eugene Salomon points to a taxi-dominated streetscape, where drivers are both in competition and paid by the mile-per-hour. “In those off-peak hours it’s a horse race to find the next fare,” he says. Plus, Manhattan is flooded with drivers from New Jersey, who are more crash-prone, says Allstate.

But New Yorkers needn’t boast. They scored dead last on a recent nationwide rules-of-the-road quiz. And the NYPD often seems more concerned with ticketing bicyclists than enforcing safe driving. Salomon, for his part, thinks the worst drivers are in L.A. “I felt intimidated on their damned expressways,” he says. After that, however, “I’d say New Yorkers are the second craziest.”

Miami is all gym rats

Would that Miami were a perpetual Spuds Mackenzie-era beer commercial. Alas, it just ain’t so, says the 10-days-to-better-abs bible, Men’s Fitness. In 2009, the magazine ranked Miami as America’s fattest big city, with over 60 percent of its residents at risk for weight-related health problems. Miami also has three times as many fast-food joints as the national average. And though lots of Miamians own gym memberships, fewer than average actually use them. The city’s high poverty rate correlates with its high obesity numbers.

Miami-based personal trainer Shuichi Take sees the gym-rat stereotype as stemming from the outsize visibility of hot spots like South Beach, as well as the city’s “semi-legitimate modeling scene.” The weather also makes Miami a prime spot for the type of sports pursued by the shirtless and beautiful. “Volleyball, paddle boarding, kite boarding, wake boarding,” says Take, “Miami is an outdoor-activity town.”

Las Vegas is filled with gamblers

The Strip may be for tourists, but Vegas locals gamble, too. According to a study conducted by the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, gambling and going to the movies virtually tie as Clark County residents’ two preferred ways to spend time. Nearly two-thirds of the city’s residents gamble occasionally. By comparison, only a quarter of Americans gambled in a casino in 2010.

Anthony Curtis, president of the city guide LasVegasAdvisor.com, thinks those stats give a warped perception of life in Las Vegas, which he says is thoroughly pedestrian for the typical resident. “People here do everything they’d do in Detroit or Atlanta or anywhere else,” he says. “Sometimes they may go to a show or a comedy club and it happens to be in a casino, and while they’re there they’ll put twenty bucks in a machine.”

Everyone in Salt Lake City is a Mormon

It’s not the holy land it used to be; less than half the city follows the Church of Latter-day Saints, and Utah as a whole is only around 60 percent Mormon these days. Statewide, the percentage of Mormons has been declining for years, according to secret church membership counts obtained by the Salt Lake City Tribune in 2005. Experts attribute the drop to Hispanic immigrants moving to Utah for jobs, not religion. If current trends continue, Utah will lose its Mormon majority by 2030.

Local non-Mormon Steven Kachocki thinks the city is slowly becoming more progressive as a result. “Although we suffer from alcohol-deprivation, there certainly seem to be more same-sex couples than there were even five years ago,” he says. “As it is with our sense of style in Utah — about 10 years behind the rest of the country — so will be our move to more liberal thinking.”

Portland is all hipsters

In 2001, the Portland Oregonian reported that sales of Pabst Blue Ribbon — at the time, an obscure beer associated with blue-collar roughnecks — were inexplicably soaring in Portland. PBR soon caught on everywhere else, and the city has been seen as a hipster epicenter ever since, spawning dedicated blogs, newspaper Style section paeans and a satirical TV show.

The conventional wisdom that Portland is filled with hipsters is deserved, thinks Michael Andersen, publisher of Portland Afoot: “More so than anywhere else I’ve lived,” he says. And several hipster-correlated metrics do seem to confirm the stereotype (using, of course, more stereotypes): The city has the highest percentage of bicycle commuters in America, PETA ranks it as the country’s second veggie-friendliest city, and Oregon — at least as of 2008 — remains the world’s top consumer of sweet, goes-down-smooth PBR.

Portlandians can be sensitive to the hipster label. “As I understand it, hipsters are young creative people who aspire to a kind of independent culture,” says Marc Moscato, an artist, curator, activist and president of the Dill Pickle Club, a nonprofit that organizes educational projects about Portland. “But there’s sort of a negative connotation to the word too, some even going so far as to say they [hipsters] are ruining Portland by the increasing gentrification and displacement.” Which is ironic, since Moscato and Andersen both believe it’s the city’s affordable housing that draws the young and creative. Before you know it, those PBRs will be two bucks a can.