Unpopular opinions involving cities

[Lear]

More opinions from BerlinHater....

Think of the douchiest, most pretentious hipsters and fake creative types in Brooklyn, London, Paris, San Francisco, etc and transport them to Berlin. I’m talking about THE most annoying of the annoying. Make them even more pretentious and annoying by giving them a "new city" to use as their hipster playground, since they seem to think they are special for living in Berlin. Make them yet somehow even more annoying, by having them either constantly complain about gentrification/rising rents (which they somehow think they are not a part of) and/or about how cheap Berlin is. They have such little self-awareness, they can't see that the Germans despise them. Especially the working class Germans in poor areas such as in Neukolln. You can see Germans nearly spitting on them as they pass them by on the street in Neukolln. Even the Turks in Kreuzberg look like they want to spit on them, yet the hipsters either ignore it or have such little self-awareness, they cannot see how unwanted they are in the neighborhoods they take over. These hipsters are typically far left types yet they think the poverty in Berlin is just fashion/part of the ambiance of Berlin.

[mrnyc]

^ haha, no not more so. that tension with the locals is pretty much true for any young, wealthy hipster gentrifying neighborhood.

[eschaton]

I had a friend who lived in Berlin over a decade ago. She lived with a bunch of other people in a big old building they were semi-squatting in. I wasn't sure how the system worked exactly - the building had been owned by someone, who stopped bothering to collect rent, yet they continued to live there and had no issue with getting utilities. Few of them seemed to have full time jobs, though most of them were artists or filmmakers. They ran an illegal bar and theater on the first floor.

From the sound of it, this is actually a pretty typical Berlin experience.