I was in the studenty,university / bohemian part of my town which is actually where I am originally from and I had family living there until about 10 years ago. We moved from a flat in the area when I was about 9 to a bigger house but we still visited family there and I even lived in a flat there about 14 years ago when I did my masters degree. All my family have now moved out of the area or passed away and I'm not there as often these days.
Anyway I had a day to myself yesterday and so I went up to the area for a mooch around and it is so different now. The vibe was always arty, intellectual and hippie-ish but it used to be a lot more ramshackle vintage shops, second hand book shops, herbalists, hippie health food shops, yoga and women's spirituality groups in the local school gym hall, CND meetings with old school veggie pilaf and nag champa wafting about. The deli's and health food shops that sold vegan pesto and macrobiotic ingredients were not the cheapest but had more of a cooperative style vibe so were affordable and the yoga classes would be a couple of pounds.
The area when I was growing up int he 90's also had a lot of slum housing, bedsits that attracted a lot of would be musicians, artists and young academics and immigrants as well as some old hippies with drug problems. I would say the majority of these bedsits and poorer quality houses were emptied out in the 2000's, renovated and sold as now luxury homes.
Looking around yesterday its so upmarket now instead of little crafty or hippy shops there are upmarket and very expensive boutiques selling bougie homewares, jewellery, or plants. There are a few chains there now like a Waitrose, a waterstones and an Oliver Bonas. Instead of small bakers doing simple bread and cakes or the simple hippie or ethnic deli's there are fancy French bakeries, up market brunch spots, glossy bubble tea cafe's. One health food shop remains but it is now very much a bougie, luxury vibe with jars of herbal tea on sale for £25 and tiny slivers of chocolate with dried fruit on sale for a fiver.
There are still some second hand bookshops but they were really expensive and didn't have quite the same Aladdin's cave feel they used to with piles of weird out of print books everywhere to dig though. They still had fliers for yoga classes but it's now £20 a class in fancy studios and it looked more like reformer pilates and barre classes were the main attraction.
It just felt more like an affluent enclave now than a sort of boho, hippy, intellectual, arty community. It is still nice and it's probably good a lot of the bad quality housing has been sorted out (some of it was really unsafe as I recall) but the areas has really changed and lost the unique character it used to have.
I suppose this is par for the course for a lot of cities? Has this happened in your area?