Grant Mitchenall isn’t sure if he’s a hipster, though he probably qualifies. He’s also not sure why someone in southwest Detroit would want him to go home, or where that home would be.

Whoever painted anti-hipster graffiti on at least four buildings in the area over the weekend didn’t provide a lot of detail. But in what appears to be a locals-vs.-hipsters turf war, this could be just the tip of the spray can.

“Respect Our Roots,” read one advisory, in orange, on the side of a defunct party store at Bagley and 18th Street. “Stop Gentrification in Detroit,” said another, in black. “This Is Southwest Go Home,” declared a third, in red. There was a fairly standard Spanish vulgarity — a bit of local color in a heavily Latino district — and then there was “HIPSTER,” in red, circled, with a slash through it.

You don’t want to read too much into scribblings on a few walls, of course. It could all just be the product of three or four people and one or two six-packs.
Where there are newcomers, though, there is often resentment. There are unfamiliar faces and different cultures and higher rents. And in Midtown and Mexicantown and Corktown and its fringes, where Mitchenall lives, there are suddenly lots of twentysomethings with piercings and tattoos.

“If anything, we’re helping,” he said. He’s 25, a waiter at the Mercury Burger Bar on Michigan Avenue near the train station, and he has the requisite nose hoops and ear studs of the wave of newcomers who have brought life and jaunty hats to sectors of the city.

He also has a sense of purpose. Having fled Shelby Township for downtown six years ago, “I feel like we’re the ones leading the renovations and getting things done.”

But not everyone wants progress, or at least not progress that looks like change. In the 1980s, residents near Wayne State groused about the influx of gays. Corktown didn’t like yuppies. Everybody wants Detroit to bounce back, but not at the expense of their property taxes.

Candidate Jean Vortkamp, a self-described community volunteer, railed at length at a mayoral forum Tuesday night about gentrification. Non-gentrification, on the other hand, hasn’t worked all that well in a city that hundreds of thousands of people have sprinted to escape.