America’s hippest city: Vancouver — in Washington state

Vancouver, Washington, was recently named “most hipster city” in the U.S. when it comes to tattoos, beer and other signs of “hipsterdom,” according to a London-based moving-information company.

The company, called MoveHub, studied rent inflation to measure gentrification and the number of microbreweries, vegan stores, tattoo parlors and thrift shops per 100,000 residents among the country’s 150 most-populous cities for the “U.S. Hipster Index.”

The Pacific Northwest’s concentration of such establishments is unsurprisingly high. Washington is the only state with three top-10 cities. The others were Tacoma and Spokane. Seattle ranked 20th.

With a population about 175,000, the Portland suburb measured supremely for its proportion of microbreweries and tattoo shops. And its 16.2 per cent increase in rent within the past year catapulted Vancouver’s score to the top.

A city comparison by Forbes and Sperling’s Best Places in October ranked Seattle No. 2 for its level of “cool,” determined by its restaurants, world-class museums, sports teams, good hiking and reliable mass transit — just behind San Francisco.

But apparently, for skinny jeans and fixed-gear bikes, Vancouver is it. “Living in Vancouver for many years, I would have to say that 98 per cent of Vancouverites don’t know what ‘hipster’ even means,” one commenter wrote on MoveHub.

Salt Lake City, Cincinnati, Boise, Idaho and Richmond, Virgina, rounded out the top five.