10 Signs Your Neighborhood is Becoming Gentrified

Urban apartment living is a truly strange experience. Many of us spend the first 18 years of our lives in the same town on the same block in the same house. In many cities, you'll be lucky to afford to live in the same apartment for 18 months.

The situation repeats itself endlessly. Financially strapped college graduates can't afford to live in the same neighborhoods as their bosses and managers, so they strike out into low income neighborhoods. This attracts businesses, which attracts more tenants and forces rents to rise, until those who lived in the neighborhood for years prior are eventually forced out.

What are the signs (besides the fact that you moved there) that your neighborhood is being gentrified? What are the canaries in the coal mine that should let you know that you'd best think about getting that security deposit back? Here are 10 Signs Your Neighborhood is Becoming Gentrified.

RELATED: 10 Most Overrated Cities in America
RELATED: 17 Reasons You Shouldn't Move to New York City
RELATED: The 50 Coolest Fictional Cities
RELATED: 25 NYC Tourist Activities That Are Actually Cool

Breakfast is a meal designed for early risers. As construction workers and janitors move out of your neighborhood, bloggers and assistant art gallery managers will move in. And they don't wake up early. You can kiss the idea of getting a meal for less than $15 goodbye. Those two eggs and bacon will now be served on an English Muffin over sauce, and violá, you'll have an over-priced eggs benedict.

Don't even think about getting hungry before 11 a.m. Your neighborhood is going to be a ghost town until then. Once the block does rise, the clomp-clomp-clomping of high heels trekking from one brunch spot to the next seeking a reservation will haunt your weekend day dreams forever. Make sure you get the unlimited mimosas, buddy; the endless banal chatter is too much to bear without liquid courage.

A truly up-and-coming urban neighborhood doesn't have a gym that you can afford. Before transplants started moving in, there was one cheap, affordable gym that had everything. How boring. This gym will close in short order and you will see specialized fitness centers that offer yoga, Crossfit, MMA, and all sorts of other fad workouts that you'll never actually comitt to.

These new spots will charge you at least five times the price, and you will need to join at least two of them to get a complete workout. Don't worry, though, they will provide you with fresh towels to wipe your tears with when you look at your credit card statement.

Dogs are traditionally good for two things: security and companionship. They are a great way to teach children responsiblity and provide them with a lively playmate. Somewhere in our evolutionary framework, we humans got it twisted.

In the last several decades, certain segments of the population have come to believe that our dogs are our children, and should be outfitted with sweaters, strollers, and Baby Bjorns. Gentrifiers don't have time for a conventional home life; they are too busy climbing that corporate ladder and living the dream of a fourteen-hour work day. Where do you think all that rent money comes from, son?

The choice isn't between a career and children; it's between children and career+dog-as-placeholder-child. Until we can engineer children to never outgrow a purse, this is a trend that likely won't go away.

Why should charitiable institutions have all the fun? Sure, Goodwill, Salvation Army, and their ilk exist to help clothe the needy who can't afford to pay department store prices. But, damn it, sometimes those needy-folk clothes look so cool!

Your newly gentrified neighborhood has a solution for you, and you won't even have to spend time rooting through old FUBU shirts, JNCO Jeans, and Starter Jackets to find that dope sweater. High-end thrift stores hunt down the coolest fashions other people used to own and sell them at prices higher than they were originally. We truly live in magical times.

Enjoy that hole-in-the-wall Mexican or soul food spot while you can. Soon enough, that beloved greasy spoon that persevered through several decades, or maybe even several generations, will be forced to close due to rising rent.

Fear not, because the restaurant will be replaced with a new one selling similar food at double the price. The words "fusion," "experience," or the prefix "pan-" will be added to the sign out front, and a roughly 80% mark-up will be added to your bill. Oh, and the food will also be way worse.

Real estate agents are clever folks. If a community has a less-than-savory reputation, the solution is to change the name. No, this apartment isn't in Bushwick, it's in "East Williamsburg." This isn't Sunset Park, this is "South Slope."

Sometimes these apartment sharks get lazy and just use abbreviations for neighborhoods—like WaHi for Washington Heights—and hope you won't notice. A word to the wise: The shorter the name of the neighborhood, the more expensive your rent is going to be.

Grafitti is a public nuisance—unless we can commission someone to create it and make it so rich people can see it from their windows. Then it's art. We are not proponents of vandalism, but nor are we fans of cheesy-ass murals memorializing the first bread factory in the city.

Gentrifiers like to know there is a place for everything and that everything is in its place. This means that they want their street art on clean canvasses, punctuating the large windows and imported wood that comprise the landscape of their quaint little block.

If you want to see some next level gentrification, we recommend taking a trip to a spot like lower Manhattan, where large corporations create billboards and even murals in the style of the street art they helped displace.

The bar on the corner, the one with the one old man slinging drinks and quirky décor on the walls, is going to close. What will replace it? A soullessly swank spot with a mustachioed bartender in suspenders tossing together artisanal cocktails. He can make any drink you want, provided that drink isn't a cheap beer. If money is an object, be sure to ask what you'll be paying for these pricey concoctions. You might end up spending half a month's rent for a single round if you aren't careful.

While you enjoy your drink (and for that price, you'd better enjoy it), you can marvel at the vaguely old-timey outfits of the staff, the vaguely old-timey font on the menu, and the vaguely old-timey jazzy-bluesy chanteuse tunes emanating from the iPod behind the bar. You can marvel at how it all feels so terribly new. It used to be that you could pay $3.50 for a pounder of some little-known swill and you could even add shot of Old Granddad to make it an even $5.

Now the only thing at the bar for $5 is the cover.

Churches, mosques, and synagogues have likely been a linchpin of your community for years. From the churches of Harlem to the synagogues of the Lower East Side, there is a deep sense of history in many urban spiritual centers. The only reliable way to guess the ethnic make-up of an immigrant neighborhood is to peep the holy temples on every corner.

The center of politics, art, and local identity in the community used to be these places of worship. These sanctuaries will surely shut down in short order. As the generations who went to these churches flee to more affordable rents, the agnostic children of WASP take their place, and have little use for these holy spots as they stand. A new generation prefers to pray in private to a diety they aren't sure exists.

It's strange seeing so many empty churches in gentrified communities. These vast spaces with matching rents no longer have any "practical use." These buildings, with their stained-glass windows and sculpted rock, are historical landmarks; developers are going to have trouble reducing the buildings to piles of rubble for condiminiums. Many of them turn into temporary art spaces as they fall into disrepair. This week it is an art gallery. Next week their will be an indie-rock show. The week after it will be the newest outpost of the Brooklyn Flea.

You should come check out our photography exhibit on religious iconography next month. We've heard it's life-changing.

As everyone's father ever probably once said, "sometimes you just want a cup of coffee." Back in the day, this was an easy goal to achieve. Walk into your corner bodega or plop down at the diner counter and you would have coffee in your hand before you could loudly complain that no one should talk to you before you've had your coffee.

When your neighborhood becomes gentrified, there will be an explosion of coffee shops with hip names and urban rustic décor, and they'll be selling you everything but coffee. Sure, you can buy coffee, but what this place will be selling you is artisinal, whipped-cream topped lattés and espressos that come in a thimble. They'll also sell you the ambience. There will be a cooler-than-thou barista pouring the froth. There will be chairs hand-crafted from drift wood. There will be an open-mic night.

The ambience is ultimately window dressing. The pain-stakingly created mood, completed with the falsely aged wall art, only serves as a beacon for customers who will promptly open their computers, force in their ear-buds hoping to enjoy their latté in peace. The lively shit talking of the old men at the diner and the dudes in and outside the bodega will be replaced with the repetitive tap-tap-tap of keyboards and the whining complaints that the wi-fi password isn't working.

"By the way, we don't serve coffee. Is an Americano OK?"