Ypsilanti

Posted by tomo at 06:53 PM in urban . | 8 Comments

I went into the hip boutique in Ypsilanti a few weeks ago and they had the most awesomest stuff. "I <3 Udon" bags, "I <3 Pho" bags. The only book they sell is Davy Rothbart's The Lone Surfer of Montana.
The store is called Henrietta Fahrenheit and it is one those few, hidden,
redeeming things about downtown Ypsituck. Which, btw, recently won the highly coveted Most Phallic Building in the World award. (Ryan told me about this infamous piece of architecture when i first moved to Ypsi.) It's pretty phallic. however, at the rate that these phalluses are getting bigger each year, i expect them to soon be as large as the shrines they are enshrined in.

On the same street is a Vietnamese restaurant called Dalat. It's pretty
good, and reasonably priced. The two combined make that block a pretty hip spot. On the next block over is the closest strip club to Ann Arbor that i know of. It made me wonder. Is Ypsilanti a cooler city than Ann Arbor if it has better pho? Can proximity to quality pho be an indicator to the hipness of a place?
So I started internetting...

Although i couldn't find any lists of cities ranked by pho-ness, I did find a list of the top 10 metro areas with the highest Vietnamese populations.

Last year Richard Florida published a book called Rise of the Creative Class. In it, he finds that the population of gays and "bohemians" are an indicator of the creativity of a city which is also an indicator of hi tech industry in a city.

Find a partial city ranking list in this article.

If you concede that San Jose and Oakland, which are listed separately on the Vietnamese list, are simply part of the San Francisco - San Jose - Oakland metro area, then, except for Orange County - Los Angeles, all metro areas are on the top 10 Creativity Index list. All top 10 Vietnamese metro areas are on the Milken Tech Pole top 15 (again lumping OC/LA and the Bay Area).
Chicago and Dallas are both at our outside of the top 15 for both gay and bohemian indices, even though it ranks 7th on the tech index. However, it ranks #10 in vietnamese population.

I guess all it means is that the Vietnamese => tech => creativity indices
are all about the same. The gay and bohemian indices are supposed to be 'canaries', whereas the Vietnamese index is just already there. This may be true of all asian populations in the us.

And while Ann Arbor ranks pretty high in creativity for mid-sized cities, I couldn't find anything at all on Ypsi.