Last week, a UCLA doctoral student named Devin McCutchen tweeted a 1985 San Francisco Chronicle quiz asking "Has your neighborhood become 'upscale'?" It's charmingly outdated: a video rental outlet was worth two points on the upscale scale, a "seconds" clothing store selling Hawaiian shirts and Nehru jackets was five points, a travel agency got two points for advertising any destination besides England, France, or Italy. "Unisex hair salon" (five points) is probably the most 1980s phrase ever written. So we've updated the quiz for today (and for Los Angeles, roughly) and switched out "upscale" for the more current "gentrified." Gentrification is very complicated—it pushes out long-time residents, it brings amenities to neighborhoods, it changes the character of a place—but this is an internet quiz, so we've just boiled it down to the most hilarious tells. If you score 10 points or more, your neighborhood is gentrified enough for the New York Times to have heard about it.
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