> But the rest, well, there are some problems. The "college towns and
> hip metropoles" are surrounded by lots of what you seem to think are
> "real people." As I remember New Haven, it was a classic old
> northeastern city filled with poor people. As I remember
> Charlottesville, it was surrounded by people who worked in
> construction and in farm implement stores. The Brooklyn zip code
> containing Williamsburg, the national capital of hip, is almost half
> Latino and full of poor people. Soho shares a zip code with
> Chinatown, which is also full of poor people. It's not as if the
> problem is massive spatial mismatch.
I think there's a housing project literally across the street from MIT, and in any case the neighborhood is hardly hip. It gets rickity (though not cheap) not a 20 min. walk from Harvard.
For all of the Boston area's rep for Brahminism and student activism, it stikes me as much more closely mixed culture-wise than Chicago.
-- Andy