Forbes Magazine, a publication not often associated with the Bohemian set, has sifted through 250 neighborhoods in the biggest U.S. cities to determine once and for all which neighborhood reigns supreme as America's best place to eat standing up after getting a haircut from a guy in suspenders. Sadly, the Mission District was just a waxed mustache hair shy of the top spot, losing out to the SoCal mecca of hipness that is Silver Lake, Los Angeles.
While LA might be stealing San Francisco's thunder here, the Mission did beat out Williamsburg, Brooklyn — the nexus of pretty much all East Coast Hipsterdom. So there's that. Anyhow, here's what Forbes had to say about the first runner-up:
"What we love about The Mission is the amazing diversity and lack of pretense in this historically hip neighborhood," says Dabney Lawless of Nextdoor.com. Restaurants, bars, coffee shops, and food trucks abound in San Francisco's oldest hood. It also has the largest concentration of street art and building murals in the city.
If you're curious about the methodology of this pageview grabbing slideshow, neighborhoods were evaluated with the help of Nextdoor.com and ranked based on a completely made up "Hipness index." That score is measured by each neighborhood's walkability rating, the number of neighborhood coffee shops per capita, the assortment of food trucks available (taking in to account each truck's Zagat rating, obviously), the frequency of farmers markets and, of course, percentage of residents who work in artistic occupations. It is currently unclear whether "Vaguely Employed Graphic Designer" counts as an occupation or whether that could have helped or hindered the Mission District in the glossy mag's contest.
Also worth noting? Uptown Oakland broke the top ten, landing at number nine on the Forbes list.
