The amount of nonsense contained in NYT's article about Williamsburg hipsters moving to the suburbs to raise kids is astonishing. To begin with (and we might as well end with), it's impossible for a community of hipsters to form in the suburbs. It's like imagining dandies living on a farm. You can't be a dandy for chickens and pigs. The whole idea of the dandy is social and urban. A dandy, like the hipster, is for the crowd on the streets, the crowd passing the cafe, the crowd pouring out of a club. You are not a dandy for yourself but always for others, lots and lots of others.

As formerly boho environs of Brooklyn become unattainable due to creeping Manhattanization and seven-figure real estate prices, creative professionals of child-rearing age — the type of alt-culture-allegiant urbanites who once considered themselves too cool to ever leave the city — are starting to ponder the unthinkable: a move to the suburbs.

Yes, Williamsburg has become expensive; yes, it's being gentrified; yes, it's time to move. But not to the fucking suburbs. What a lot of nonsense. Please just read Jonathan Raban's Soft City. It will tell you where to go when your city has become hard: You go to a city that's soft. What's a soft city? It's a cheap city, a city that capital has more or less deserted. Where is there such a city today? Detroit is as soft as you can get.