Also Doloras "hipsters selling each other coffee and vegan snacks" is actually a sign of a prosperous city, hand crafted and artisan products are not cheap. In Wellington we have literally dozens of hand made and craft food and beverage providers, all of these are high priced luxury items that are the first to fail in a downturn. These are also the sorts of industries that intelligent cities should love and encourage, because they keep a CBD vibrant, add to the culture, are almost immune to being killed by online ordering or a new mall, and are loved by tourists and guests.
The whole "hipsters selling each other coffee and vegan snacks" thing is why one of the ways they decided to get punters into the stadium was to introduce craft beers and better food, because that's what Wellingtonians like, and you can only like that sort of stuff when you can afford to like it, when you have disposable income - and that comes from having the highest wages in the country but actually (almost) affordable housing. Imagine that.
What you saw, you looked down on because it was strange to you - it wasn't harassed looking people, eating Mcdonalds under neon lights in the many kilometres of anonymous chain stores in some monstrous slab of concrete outside of a dying CBD. What you saw and dismissed as being so foreign was people enjoying themselves and more importantly enjoying life. What you saw was, in actual fact, prosperity.