The "hip" part of town and the cost of getting there

today liz and i walked to and through a part of the whicker park neighborhood in Chicago. We took Millwaukee Ave down from the Logan square neighborhood where we are staying and spent 30 or so minutes making our way to what looked like a part of town that has been gentrifying for quite some time and now is beginning to become unrecognizable as what it once was. two of the people we are staying with, drew and nick, talked with us this morning about how in the last year or so lofts have just been slapped up by developers. they have replaced/erased the older homes and buildings that were a part of "the built environment"--a term i began to like today--before. it has really struck me how cities are looking more and more a like as liz and i encounter each newly rebuilt section that is dubbed to be the "hip part of town." lofts, lofts, lofts. live/work spaces. boutiques. galleries. lofts. and they all seem to be inaccessible to people that have lived in each new "hip part of town" as it became "hip" and before it was even considered for 'hipness." i know this observation isn't anything new or profound, but it has been illustrated to liz and me over and over again. we have begun to make jokes about how the trends and then we realize how we must look walking around in all that hipness, how we are associated with the newly built environment and how we are a part of the identities it wants to attract and help create--young, creative, urban settlers. it's frustrating. is there anything that can't be coopted and turned into an "experience" or comodity to be consumed? also, cities are getting more and more expensive to travel in: $2.00 to take a train or bus in chicago and no free transfers if you pay cash? $1.50 to take the bus in seattle. $1.25 in san francisco, but transfering was easy...something's got to change or getting around cities is going to become even more privileged, or really just inaccesible. yet again an obvious observation. oh how experience illuminates the obvious.