Dear citizens of San Marino (median household income $139,122), be careful who you call “sketchy,” a word recently applied to outsiders by a local resident.

A group called the Eastside Bicycle Club is planning on showing the upper crust of the San Gabriel Valley just how sketchy neighbors to the south are by organizing a “Riff Raff Ride Into San Marino.”

The July 5 event starts six miles – and a socioeconomic world away – in working-class El Sereno:
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The ride is a response to a Pasadena Star-News story about San Marino's increasing NIMBY attitude toward urban outsiders, which the newspaper says are considered to be riffraff in the wealthy community.

First, the local City Council has given the city's farmers' market a possibly limited lifespan after neighbors complained about the “sketchy” outsiders coming to town to purchase organic produce.

See also: New San Marino Farmers Market Opens

Then came complaints about the town's 2014 Bicycle and Pedestrian Plan, which could (gasp) give lower-income bike riders easier access to San Marino.

That was enough for the Eastside Bicycle Club's Carlos Morales to organize his loyal riff raff. He told the Star-News that the ride will probably go by City Hall:

I found it discriminatory that here we're in the 21st century and people still think this way. Our bike rides … it crosses all ethnic barriers as well as financial barriers. We have people who are maybe homeless or students, and we have people who are professionals – they are entrepreneurs.”

 … We want to expose people who have never traveled into San Marino. We want to expose them to how beautiful the city is.

At least 77 people have RSVP'd for the event via Facebook.

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