We decide who comes to our suburbs, and how they come

“Die, yuppie scum!” gets a 21st-century revamp on the mean streets of Melbourne’s Footscray.

After an attack on a burger bar, word of more anti-hipster actions in Melbourne’s Footscray. The Age, Tuesday:

A bag of rotting meat was hurled through the door of Footscray’s Rudimentary Cafe only days before burger bar 8bit was trashed and covered with anti-hipster graffiti. The cafe on Leeds Street, built from shipping containers and serving third-wave, cold-drip and pour-over coffee since it opened in 2015, is the fourth new establishment in gentrifying Footscray to be targeted in recent weeks.

Third-wave coffee? We just wanted a flat white. Wikipedia explains, yesterday:

The third wave of coffee is a movement to produce high-quality coffee, and consider coffee as an artisanal foodstuff, like wine, rather than a commodity.

One academic may have some insight into these attacks on Footscray’s newest … Footscrayans? News.com.au, yesterday:

Human geography lecturer Oli Mould, from Royal Holloway University, wrote on The Conversation some people feared gentrification, leading them to take it out on hipsters … He said “even middle-class people have a right to be angry at an urban capitalism that is pricing them, and their children, out of the city”.

Then again … Matt Holden, The Age, Tuesday:

Gentrification … starts when the “original” working-class or recent migrant inhabitants of a low-rent neighbourhood get a foothold on the ladder of opportunity and decide to move to bigger, newer houses in the suburbs. Perhaps they should learn to stay put in their inner-city hovels.

What else can we blame hipsters for? Lesbian journalist Krista Burton writes that “hipsters broke my gaydar”, The New York Times, December 31:

Give me your undercuts, your mes­senger bags, your androgynous “dapper” clothing. Give me your commitment to environmentally friendly transportation, your $8 cider (the only gluten-free option at the bar) and the password to your Etsy store where you sell cloth menstrual pads screen-printed with astrological symbols … All of these things are the property of my people. We did this to society.

There may be a profitable new line in section 18C anti-discrimination cases for the Australian Human Rights Commission in all this. The Australian, August 26 last year:

For an organisation that exists to deal with complaints about discrimination, how would it look if demand for its services under section 18C were to shrink to a mere handful of matters?

Or if harassed hipsters can’t become a new protected class, how about aggrieved Americans? The Daily Telegraph, yesterday:

Supermarket giant Aldi has been accused of vilifying Americans by portraying them in a Christmas tele­vision ad as “gaudy, pushy people” … The complainant told the Advertising Standards Board: “This is highly offensive to any American. The Americans are portrayed as … weird … As an American I take offence at the way we are portrayed … The ad demonises an entire nationality and culture … to sell groceries.”

The complainant should read coverage in the local press about Donald Trump. The Daily Telegraph reports the Advertising Standards Board’s verdict, yesterday:

The board ruled that the commercial did not breach the advertising code and dismissed the complaints.