A more interesting indicator that authors may consider is how many people living in the area do jogging.
When I moved to London's SE4 postcode three years ago (it's pretty close to Peckham, FWIW), the regeneration of the area has just started and the more middle-class looking people appeared around, the more men and women in running gear were visible in the streets in the morning. Poor on average take worse care of their health and fitness, so tapping into Runkeeper's data may prove useful.
In the meanwhile, during these three years, the value of my home grew more than 100%.
Poor on average take worse care of their health and fitness
I think it can be primarily attributed to the low income jobs being more physically and
emotionally draining which result in them being sapped by the time they reach home.
This can also be witnessed in the amount of nurture they can provide to their offspring. An
interesting argument in one of the Quora thread about being rich was that financial freedom
let's them have the flexibility to spend more time with their kids.
I think you're right, and furthermore note that low income jobs in the US rarely come with health insurance (until very recently), and also were lacking in paid sick leave. Some of these jobs will even fire you for taking unpaid sick leave. On top of all of that, although health clinics do exist which operate outside of normal working hours, the quality of care appears to be worse.
There's a simple economic explanation for why poor people might do less jogging. Jogging is a luxury activity: it takes time and energy, without producing any income; it doesn't get you a job or take care of the kids. If you are struggling just to get by, it wouldn't necessarily be a wise expenditure of energy.
Poor people also tend to live in dangerous neighborhoods, which can make jogging a bad idea.
I think that's wildly speculative. A physically draining job should keep one somewhat fit and healthy, after all. That's to say nothing of the fact that the poorest people I've seen in the U.S. don't even have jobs. Their children too, are obese - which really suggests that it's more of a culture issue.
It could be that, but it could also be a general approach towards life.
Certainly people are born into poor circumstances and have many misfortunes. At the same time some people (for whatever reason) are just lazy, sloppy and don't take care of their lives. This approach likely produces both poverty and poor health and almost certainly entails lack of exercise.
We can't excuse every bad thing that happens as an event out of people's personal control. There is too much of that going on lately and it doesn't help anyone imop.
Who's making excuses? Poor people often come from poor cultures -- ones that don't place value on things like jogging in the morning. That's just a fact, it isn't an excuse or a statement about personal control. And we, as a society, have the ability to influence both individual behavior and culture, so it doesn't even matter which one you want to assign blame to.
While not necessarily "excuse making", the original poster gives a reason he thinks poor people don't exercise (because they are working too hard). I believe, in general, the reasons poor people don't exercise are not that at all, but results from the same types of behaviors and attitudes that encourage poverty.
I'm not assigning cause necessarily... I agree when you say the problem is likely often cultural. People from different cultures or with different metabolisms certainly have an easier/harder time dealing with certain things in life. But until attitudes and behaviors change (by whatever means), the facts on the ground stay the same. Very rarely is outcome 100% happenstance.
Woah, I think you're way off here. All class systems are a result of how you're raised. Raise a "poor" person in a rich family and they will be smarter, more healthy, etc. Likewise take a rich baby and put it in a poor family and watch it's environment mold it.
Humans in general are striking similar physically. We are all homo-sapiens. It's almost entirely nurture, it was sad to read your comment because to deny that being raised by parents who are often tired, overworked, underfed, undereducated, etc, etc, doesn't continue a cycle.
It might depend on what variables you're referring to, but according to some famous studies done on identical twins separated at birth; intelligence and personality are about 70% genetic and 30% environment. While these studies conclusively suggest that it's actually 'almost entirely nature', I agree that the potential 30% disadvantage is something that can and should be fixed.
I don't know how much nature/nurture is involved. I assume some percentage of each in most cases. And, I'm not blaming victims nor suggesting people pull themselves up by their bootstraps in the face of massive adversity (which is what people often appear to assume when "responsibility" is mentioned).
Very simply, I don't think being overworked is the leading cause of the negative correlation between poverty and exercise (if one even exists). Instead, a confounding variable (a behavior or attitude) common to both poverty and lack of exercise exists and results in a manifestation of both (in most, but certainly not all cases).
What published studies with adequate controls and replication show that "It's almost entirely nurture"? Do you think genetic variance between individuals is irrelevant for life outcomes? If genetics is not entirely irrelevant, do you think it might cumulatively affect individuals through a gene-by-environment interaction?
>the original poster gives a reason he thinks poor people don't exercise (because they are working too hard)
The original poster did not claim that. The poster claimed that they would be restricted in how much energy could be expended elsewhere due to the amount energy expended acquiring income.
>behaviors and attitudes that encourage poverty
Such as? I'm not sure lazy and sloppy are really behaviors or attitudes. They seem to just be your subjective judgement of someone else.
Behaviors and attitudes that encourage poverty are probably those that inhibit learning.
But I'm white, speak English, was born to a middle class family that valued education, and sit in the air conditioning all day for work. I'm clearly a hard worker. Now the guy who cuts my lawn? He was born in another country, came from a family that didn't value education or even speak English, and his office is 100 degrees in the summer here. He's clearly lazy.
'You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.' - Tony Robbins
I'm center/right wing also but coming from a poor neighborhood I know that things are not so clear as you say. It takes an _huge_ effort to get out from that way of life specially when you are younger. I was lucky to have a family that value learning but I know that it was a minority there. Most school friends at the time didn't have ANY books at home and their parents didn't care about that.
Yes, some people are lazy. Yes, most people are proud ignorants. But the surrounding culture took them there. Among rich families there are lazy people also but their 'infrastructure' simplifies a lot their life. e.g. Rich people can afford to hire people to help them with chores so they have more time for themselves. Poor people can't so their chores start to accumulate and everything around them seems sloppy.. to complicate the situation they are used to it once most people around them do the same.
"The poster claimed that they would be restricted in how much energy could be expended elsewhere due to the amount energy expended acquiring income."
Wait...how exactly is that different from "working too hard to exercise"?
Sure, everything is subjective. Everything is a matter of degree and scale and perspective. Still... certain attitudes and behaviors are more likely to result in certain outcomes. This is true irrespective of "who is at fault".
Not a bad idea, but you'd have to adjust for age. There are tons of joggers around every college campus, for example, but those tend not to be great places for anyone else to live. Measuring at different times of day might be interesting too. As a runner (not jogger) myself, I do notice that there are very different kinds of people running at different times. The older folks tend to go out in the morning, while the late-afternoon crowds are distinctly young looking. Lunch-break and off-hour crowds are both in between. Which of these says what about home values or general desirability? I don't know, but it would be interesting to see the results.
Not necessarily a good data source for mapping jogging, poor people don't have expensive smart phones to record their routes. This might make it even better for mapping wealth thought.
That only works if outdoor jogging is strong in the culture. I've spent time in France and jogging through the neighborhood I was in (mid class) was quite out of place.
to what you're saying - I would think jogging would be a prime example of 'network' effect. If you head out to Beverly Hills, you don't see anyone jogging except the dog walkers. But in certain parts of say, Hyderabad in India, the super-rich areas have massive number of 'walkers' (even though the air is highly polluted and walking there is probably detrimental)
Hard to monitor programmatically - there's probably a ton of subtle indicators (ownership of espresso machines, holiday destinations, etc) but monitoring opening and closing of businesses in specific categories can be done quite easily on a large scale.
Would be fascinating to map this in NYC or London and compare past patterns to see if it holds true.
I wonder if the various fitness apps would be willing to open their data to studies. It would be incredibly interesting to see an exercise heatmap overlayed with various other ones, especially housing prices.
Maybe poor on average can't exercise or buy health shit because they are working enriching those fucking joggers lives by working in factories, restaurants, kitchen, toilet and whatever other material whims of the privileged.
Yup. You'd be paying fines and penalties if you posted this from the USA. I doubt there'd be criminal prosecution under 42 USC unless you repeatedly continued posting this kind of content after warnings, but that is not legal advice.
It's illegal for anyone involved in the housing or real estate industries to propagate racist information. Also it's illegal to advocate racist opinions about housing policy in public discussions.
And jogging is just as obvious as fried chicken and coffee shops.
Are jogging, fried chicken and coffee shops clear signals for specific parts of the population outside the US as well?
I live in Berlin and would have trouble correlating any of the above with distinct subsets of the population -- all kinds of people from natives to immigrants, young and old, rich and poor go jogging, eat fried chicken (or Döner) and have coffee.
Fried chicken is general is associated with African Americans, particularly of lower-middle or lower status. Coffee shops in general are associated with younger, upper-middle class white people.
That's not to say there aren't areas where it doesn't hold true very often, but that's the general sentiment.
While I"m not familiar with specific laws in this area, the practice known as "redlining" is a serious issue that has been a big force for keeping segregation alive de facto.
If this is new information for you (it really shouldn't be, but better late than never), I strongly recommend reading Ta-Nehisi Coates's impressive history and analysis of the racist problems in the housing industry.
I know that my wife isn't allowed to answer the question "Are the schools good here?" with anything other than "This home is in school district 123", or "you'll have to do your own research". It's considered "steering". (Because Good Schools is considered a dog whistle for "white neighborhood")
The policies enforced by particular offices (often based on an excess of caution, and often based on mythology of law rather than actual legal advice) are a different thing than the law. It absolutely is not illegal to provide answers to that question more directly when selling real estate (and, in fact, most agents I've dealt with or encountered will, though rather than providing their opinion they will rather directly provide statistical data which answers that question -- and others -- with comparative information; the package I got from the agent for the last house I considered buying included not only school performance information for the neighborhood compared to other areas in the region, but also income information, family size information, and other demographics.)
Providing a bare and unsupported simple subjective "good" or "bad" answer is probably more legally dangerous than providing factual information, not because "good schools" is dog whistle for "white neighborhood" (in fact, its neither illegal nor uncommon to provide factual information which fairly directly gives information about ethnic/racial demographics), but because someone else might convince a court that your description was slanted because you were trying to steer the buyer based on your perception of their racial fit, rather than trying to provide them factual information about the existing character of the neighborhood which might be relevant to their decision.
"It absolutely is not illegal to provide answers to that question more directly when selling real estate"
As applied in the US (not the original article, but I suspect where nsxwolf is talking about), the Federal Fair Housing Act (Title VIII of the Civil Rights Act of 1968) would prohibit certain questions from being answered.
> As applied in the US (not the original article, but I suspect where nsxwolf is talking about), the Federal Fair Housing Act (Title VIII of the Civil Rights Act of 1968) would prohibit certain questions from being answered.
I can't find anything in your source to support that claim that answering questions would be prohibited, in fact, it seems to directly contradict the claim about merely providing an opinion on school quality being prohibited as steering (p. 12, "Racial steering is where a real estate agent steers white persons to one community
or area and minorities to another community or area. [...] The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals has held the proof of a discriminatory motive is required in a steering case.")
The racial steering section does not support the claim that answering questions is prohibited (in fact, it specifically as I quoted identifies that courts have held that proof of discriminatory motive is required in steering cases.)
"9. Many of my clients ask me questions about the neighborhood, such as: “Who lives here? Are there any [fill in ethnic/racial group]?” How should I respond to questions like these?
Let your clients know that you cannot provide information on racial, ethnic or other protected class demographics under the fair housing laws, which prohibit discrimination based on such factors. Consider giving all of your clients a written statement about your commitment to fair housing when you first start working with them. This statement also can let clients know what services you can provide them and what information they’ll need to find out on their own. When you discuss your commitment to fair housing early on, your clients may be less likely to express their possible biases.
Many agents give a resource packet to all clients at the first meeting. The packet provides a broad range of information, including online resources to locate up-to-date neighborhood census information, community resources, local media, etc. By providing general information to all of your clients, you make it easier for them to find the perfect home. See Appendix B for some area resources for home buyers to include in your own packet.
For your own protection, make sure you document any specific requests from your prospects and clients that you feel may have fair housing implications. Keep a record in your files of both the request and your response."
I've seen a friend ask vague questions trying to determine what kind of population lived in an apartment complex she was interested in renting from, and quickly get blanket responses not wanting to answer such questions, with references to the Fair Housing Act.
I don't recall all of the exact details, but, to your general question, I think the answer is at least "yeah, sometimes".
Relax. Even if there is such a law it certainly is not illegal in USA to "advocate (...) opinions (...) in public". See what happened last time someone thought advocating opinions was illegal [1]...
From a real estate agent, yes, I would surprised if that was not forbidden by the Fair Housing Act. Also, I assume, from landlords or sellers. But I also assume that does not extend to people who are part of the renting and selling of homes.
Protected class in the Fair Housing Act, so in the US (I have no idea about the UK) it is true. One online real estate statistics site got hit with it but its been a while so I don't remember who.
Of course not. Many of the documents still in circulation stipulate that houses cannot be sold to black people. That was the law for many districts and FHA policy prior to the civil rights movement.
Ugh, P.C. white people annoy me. You're not better than a racist, you're just better intentioned.
Why on earth would we that poverty and fried chicken (and black people) aren't associated? Racism begets poverty, and poverty begets lack of nutritional education and resources, which causes black people to consume more cheap, fatty foods. Throw in a lot of southern and caribbean cultures, and that equates to fried chicken.
Your political correctness is counterproductive. Calling this discussion racist prevents people from talking about it. White people coming up with reasons to cry "racism" so they can feel good about themselves is just another variation of racism. Instead, how about you listen to actual black people.
True, but there are other factors in who eats fried chicken than taste. While I don't have statistical evidence, I'd be surprised if black people didn't eat more fried chicken than white people (in the US). As I pointed out, this is likely a function of poverty, not skin color, but poverty and skin color are correlated.
And only in the US would this be immediately acted upon as such. And that's because we all have to pretend there's no cultural link between anything and anything else.
For we must treat all Americans as ideal beige spherical cows (Oh $h!+ did I just fat shame? Don't sue me! Don't sue me!). So even if a correlation is real, you're just flat out not allowed to say so, right?
There are plenty of other flaws in this analysis without having to play the race card, don't you think?
There's no justification for the assumption of a high coffee-to-chicken ratio implying up-and-coming. It's not an unreasonable assumption, but it's definitely anecdotal.
It's anecdotal, but enough reliable anecdotes do actually turn into "data".
My personal marker has always been, when visiting a city for the first time, to pay attention to the roadside advertisements I see on the ride from the airport to the city center.
Aside from obvious things like payday/title loan shops, the most reliable indicator I've seen of a neighborhood being badly off is ads for cheap dentures and dental implants.
For me, check cashing shops are a huge sign I'm in a poor neighborhood.
Businesses with signs in Spanish is another, though that's probably specific to Texas and the southwest, since we have a lot of poor Hispanic neighborhoods here. Unfortunately, the Hispanic neighborhoods here are almost universally poor. You go farther north, there probably won't be many Hispanic neighborhoods at all.
Put them together, and seeing "Cambiamos Cheques" is a huge red flag.
Your experience here is a bit anecdotal and might say a bit about what your frame of reference for what it means to be "hispanic".
But of course, I don't know you, so feel free to ignore my point :D
However, if you walk around the (objectively affluent) La Cantera mall in San Antonio, you'll hear maybe 1/3 of the conversations in Spanish.
About 30% of the folks in Texas speak Spanish, so if you're in Texas you're in a hispanic area by definition....what you're describing are areas where people are or aren't willing to pander to folks who aren't bilingual.
I don't know if that describes a line between affluence and poverty though. It's possible, though I'm not sure if I believe it.
As someone who lived in florida, those affluent hispanic areas don't have billboards in spanish. Billboards in spanish signal a large amount of single-language homes, and when that single language isn't the native tongue it doesn't bode well for socio-economic prospects
Agreed... and there is certainly no reason to restrict the analysis to just two types of shops.
However, fried chicken and coffee shops make for a really catchy way to introduce the possibilities of geo-analysis. I think maybe the point of the blog was to introduce a type of analysis, rather than to test for up and coming areas?
I live in one of the more affluent areas of my town. In is a dental implant center a single title loan store. In the same area are 5 starbucks and a few locally owned coffee shops.
The title loan shop I always wondered why it was there since I assumed it didn't get much business. What I'm confused about though is the dental implants. Perfect teeth are completely disposable income.
Dentures and implants are more about functioning teeth than "perfect" teeth. Poor folks can live with unsightly teeth but they can't subsist entirely on jello. Patients with unlimited dental budgets will be aggressively sold on root canals and veneers by every dentist they see. Most dentists don't want to make dentures or place implants, so they price themselves out of that market.
However, some dentists make inexpensive dentures, and poor patients will drive hundreds of miles to see those dentists. Because such dentists make 20x as many dentures as their higher-priced colleagues, they're much better at it. In this case price is negatively correlated with quality. The implant market isn't quite like that yet, but it's going in that direction.
Why not try a backtest? Pick a point in time (say, Jan 1, 2011). Pick another data point (say, Jan 1 2015). See which variables explain the rise in house prices the best?
If the prediction works forward, it should be backward predictive too... That's not a sufficient condition, but it is necessary to validate the predictive power, provided assumptions haven't changed in the time period being tested.
Well, as are most things in life, even in science before they are checked out -- they start as observations.
The important thing is whether it serves well as a predictor.
If we were that interested we could do a scientific analysis, counting coffee shops and chicken places in different urban areas, averaging incomes, checking trends etc.
But since it's not that important to most of us, we can just use it as a kind of gauge of where things are going, and judge for ourselves if it has merit or not. Might help someone make a few bucks by buying property in the right area (although the most succesful of tose people already use this and a ton of other metrics, plus insider knowledge of future municipal plans etc).
right, which shows you the value of Big Data. Probably the best measures of real estate value trends are available not to real estate experts, but to Google starting with everybody's inboxes, combined with search, geolocation, etc.
That's the thing, you'd need to demonstrate how "coffee shop / chicken shop" density correlates with house prices over time, and whether it's a predictor or a lagging indicator. There might be better correlators - art galleries and cocktail bars are probably other good ones, or most effects might be mostly priced in, or house price increases might be mostly related to investment in repairing shoddy properties, etc. etc.
I do think it's a cute way for someone who doesn't know London that well to quickly find likely up-and-coming areas, though and a good starting hypothesis.
I could be that often coffee shops take over old chicken shops given the size and locations.
In London I have observed that gentrification often stems from students living in a cheap area, they make it cool with lots of bars, pubs, events etc.
This attracts graduates, who are typically DINKYs, they then add to the available cash in the area and start buying property. Eventually they have kids and the area becomes more mature and expensive.
The area next on the tube/train line is typically next to get gentrified by the graduates: Clapham -> Balham/Clapham Junction, East Dulwich -> Peckham/Brockley/Forest Hill, Shorditch -> Dalston/Hakney, whilst new students pick new areas, influenced by cheap rent.
You'd have to filter for 'trendy' ones though. Something like cocktail bars based out of shipping containers on top of abandoned multi-storey car parks or cocktail bars with the same names as businesses at the same address that used to be shoe shops. :-) Something like that...
"But how would I live without all the art galleries I never visit, my four-hour daily commute, being groped on the Tube, black snot, getting mugged for my iPhone, and my upstairs neighbour’s regular all-night dubstep sessions?"
I lived in Peckham. One night I went next door to tell my neighbour to stop playing dance music full volume at 4am. Another time I phoned the police and they would only send someone round when they had enough backup. "Good times".
We made this (Dutch) dataviz a couple of months ago about the gentrification of Amsterdam, and indeed, the number of yoga studios and coffee bars closely resembled the gentrificated areas:
It asserts a correlation between the fried chicken/coffee shop ratio index and home price, which is reasonable enough. It then assumes that homes that are undervalued vis-a-vis their implied value by the FC/CS index are up and coming. This likely makes sense in an environment of overall rising house prices. However if house prices are falling or stagnant overall it may be the coffee shops which are lagging the market.
and get a correct estimate of b, as long as y and z are uncorrelated.
(Where this breaks down: for example, a regression of IQ on age and arm length; omit age and you'll get longer arms (older kids) producing higher IQ scores, because age and arm length are correlated.)
If I am understanding you correctly it seems that you only have an issue if coffee shop count is 'lagging the market' but you never actually say whether you believe it is?
It seems that you are just pointing out the obvious; this person's analysis assumes that coffee shop count is a leading indicator but you are not giving any reason why this is a flawed assumption.
I wish I could find the article, but they showed that neighborhoods with check-cashing stores were lower income than those without. No mention of the others. Although I suspect bail bond offices aren't a reliable indicator of economic stability; they're more likely to indicate proximity to a courthouse. In SF, they're all on Bryant St by the criminal court. The area is slightly sketchy for obvious reasons, but the houses/condos there are probably not cheap. I've lived in 4 other cities and the majority of bail bonds places are within a block of the justice centers.
Anecdotally, I live in San Francisco and have lived in two neighborhoods. One was midway through the process of gentrification and the other is in its final stages. There were many remittance/check-cashing outlets in the former. I live in the latter now and there are 7 coffee shops within a block of me; no chicken joints at all. And the closest check-cashing store to me is about a third of a mile away on Market St.
Same principle applies to 'big chain' type retailers and such. If the local grocery stores aren't large regional chain stores... likely not a good area.
The opposite can also be true. Secluded neighborhoods with lots of small mom-and-pop shops instead of commercial giants may be a location driver. My nearest chain is only a mile away but my community is built around a strip of independent shops.
What does "likely not a good area" mean? In NYC there are plenty of "nice areas" that don't have major chain stores. In many cities this is the case.
I grow tired of the underlying racism people exhibit (such as yours) without even being aware of it. You're probably not a blatant racist but I think a lot of people from mainstream white culture need to start inspecting and criticizing their view of the world a bit more.
There are a lot of good people living in what you call "not a good area".
Street crime (muggings / random unprovoked assaults); petty vandalism; burglary; schools where your kid will get beat up for exhibiting the slightest amount of intellectual curiosity or non-standard behaviors / appearance.
Yeah, the data looks full of gaps. Can't believe there's none in Mitcham/Morden/Wimbledon either.
The other issue is that the house prices start rising long before the fried chicken franchisees' leases expire and get taken over by fair trade coffee shops, artisanal bakeries and cereal bars. My street has two of the latter three, a real ale pub, a weekly "organic farmer's market" and a Waitrose but the pawnshops are still there.
I wasn't surprised to see that Tottenham seems to have the highest density of fried chicken. But I was surprised to see it seems to have more than SE LDN...
Not sure where the data for the article came from, but I'd guess that there is some interesting socioeconomic skewing around the type of business and whether it can be readily found on Google maps or Yelp, since much of the data is crowdsourced.
Well, China is definitely not an "up and coming" country. I've been here like a week and I already don't want to ever look at chicken in my life again.
Funny, I'm in Beijing right now and there are coffee shops everywhere. You can pick a random street corner, close your eyes, throw a rock, and it will probably shatter the window of a coffee joint. And chicken dishes take at least a bit of effort to find, with pork being the king of meats, and beef a distant second. Aside from KFC, of course, which is all over.
Greetings from Shenzhen. Lots of coffee shops here too, but chicken you can get absolutely everywhere. Pork is ubiquitous too. Beef, as far as I can tell, much less so.
Also, the longer I'm staying here the more I'm getting cured out of obsessing over my energy use. The amount of propane a street vendor uses to prepare a single meal is greater than what I use up in an entire day.
I wonder if the choice of meats is a regional thing. I would definitely not peg chicken as characteristic of China, but I've never been anywhere near Shenzhen.
Chicken is sort of a stereotype of China where I come from (Poland) - probably because most of the "chinese" restaurants serve primarily all possible permutations of chicken. What surprised me though is that sea food seems also extremely popular here - you can buy all kinds of crayfish, snails, lobsters, etc.
I think chicken is pretty popular in US Chinese restaurants as well.
Seafood is a big thing in Beijing too. I've been out to a lot of restaurants with my Chinese in-laws and almost every meal includes a whole baked fish, and other aquatic creatures besides.
Be gentle but firm if the locals keep trying to feed you pizza and fried chicken. Food in China is awesome. Ask to go where the people you are visiting eat lunch normally.
I'm on business here and unfortunately all people I meet daily eat out in the same chicken-and-rice joints (or KFC).
I would really love to find a good pizza source though. I love pizza. Unfortunately, local PizzaHut isn't as good as I'd expected and serves primarily pizzas with chicken and... beans. Or something like this.
Also, it's not that I don't like chicken or rice. It's just after a week of eating it twice a day I feel a strong need for change :).
(Restaurant) Food in China is terrible! The bigger the city you are in, the more so. You probably like it because you're not used to the taste of MSG which is used freely and generously in China to cover up stale ingredients. Having eaten out daily in Shanghai and Guangzhou for a few years, I got pretty sick of it.
Monosodium glutamate you can get it in a powder like salt. It is a seasoning that provides "the essence of flavor" or umami flavoring which makes lots of bland stuff taste way better without necessarily having lots of salt. Some claim it is bad for the health or causes MSG symptom complex with an array of common conditions like headaches but there's little to no scientific evidence that this isn't psychosomatic.
I'm getting tired of eating all possible permutations of chicken and rice. They're very tasty, of course, but it's getting too monotonous for me at this point.
Also everything that's not chicken and rice seems to be made out of sugar :<.
Wouldn't you want an area with both? I may be missing the context of London's culture - but if 'up and coming' means 'being gentrified' wouldn't you want to pick an area that has a barbell distribution of upper class and lower class establishments?
Worst: some areas are very coffee-dense only because they're close to large transportation hubs, which usually don't make for great areas. Chicken shops gravitate towards entertainment areas, which may or may not be "up and coming".
So besides "chicken shops" which must be a regional indicator for poor or undesirable what other establishments are also present? There should be an obvious transition type of business that precedes the coffee shop. Combined with chicken shops perhaps the availability of different businesses could give entrepreneurs an indicator where to set up similar or buy up space?
Pawnshops, payday loan services, barber shops... And pubs closed down, because it is too dangerous for them to operate. Also signs on restaurants "Customer only toilets"
Charity shops. Often when an area starts to fail as a shopping hub and retailers close when landlords can't get a new business in and have a void they still have to pay business rates. The way to avoid this is to charge rent to a charity shop which doesn't have to pay business rates, so they win even if the charity shop is paying lower rent than the business before.
Yeah I would say pawn shops and payday loan services are the biggest indicators of a neighborhood in decline. They seem like the two predatory businesses that show up just as a neighborhood is seeing people with any money leave.
Most have the barber come to them or have a private barber in the building. My office has a separate room and a barber comes in every other week to cut hair.
Tattoo parlors. Strip clubs. Hole-in-the-wall liquor stores. Pull-tab joints. Attended laundromats (people who live in bad neighborhoods don't have their own washers and dryers, and ones that are inside apartment buildings tend to get vandalized/broken into).
I imagine liquor stores that sell pull-tabs. I'm unaware of stores dedicated to selling pull-tabs but there are a lot of corner liquor stores that are more or less frequented by people purchasing pull-tabs and cigarettes more than anything else.
Now that's an interesting indicator - many of these are variations of the same theme and lagging indicators. Yours is (except for areas in immediate transitions) a real time indicator idea. At least in the US.
It would definitely work in the UK as well - especially as you can tell the age of a car from the number-plate. Find a run down area and track the number of newer family cars or BMWs/Audis.
...or the fact that there are cars parked on the street vs not.
I've lived in poor suburban neighborhoods and generally, the poorer the neighborhood, the more cars were parked on the street. I've lived in neighborhoods that looked like used car lots! Poorer neighborhoods tend to have more houses without garages. And in neighborhoods that have garages, the poorer families tend to use their garages as extra bedrooms, workshops, meth labs, basically anything BUT storing cars.
Note, this stereotype probably only works in the suburbs, because in urban areas, every potential parking spot is filled with a car by default.
You put a fried chicken shop in a place where lots of people go while you put a coffee shop in places where there are few coffee shops. I'm sure that correlates with 'up and coming', but it's not necessarily a signature. Some up and coming places will have neither.
>You put a fried chicken shop in a place where lots of people go
I think the idea of the article is that you put one in a place where lots of the "wrong people" go.
E.g. that "up and coming" urban professionals et al, don't go much for "fried chicken" -- as I understand in the US it's associated with rednecks, blacks, and the poor? (as opposed to Starbucks or Whole Foods).
Yes, fried chicken is stereotypically a southern-US (poor part of the country, for a variety of historical reasons) and even more stereotypically African-American (poor segment of the population, similarly due to all sorts of historical issues from slavery to overt discrimination to more recent covert discrimination). Which means that fast-food restaurants specializing in fried chicken are a pretty strong economic marker.
On the flip side, coffeeshops have a connotation of being more a middle-class thing. So tracking coffeeshops vs. fried chicken would be a very obvious way to map affluence in the US.
>you put a coffee shop in places where there are few coffee shops
Not where I live. Coffee shops (and bakeries, for that matter) over here usually cluster together, and when one opens, you can expect another one or two to open nearby, sometimes even next doors (in areas like "artistic" neighborhoods or next to universities). In the end there's like four to five coffee shops/bakeries next to each other with no possible explanation of how they're all still in business.
He seems to be measuring current housing prices, but if his goal is to measure "up and coming" areas, shouldn't he try to correlate between ratio of fried chicken vs coffee shops in PREVIOUS years, and change of prices in the following years?
I'm thinking that coffee shops are not a leading indicator, which is what he should be looking for. I have no idea what would be leading indicator for up and coming neighborhoods though.
This would not be an effective method for the Southern USA. Nashville, which is most certainly up and coming, is also springing up "Hot Chicken" shacks left and right in the hippest areas.
I've just realised that this wasn't a `Show HN` so the submitter and the author may well be different people. I've left a comment on the medium article.
The reason I ask is that I recently purchased a house in Manchester and as part of that collected as much data as possible on things like crime stats, walking time to nearest reailway station, cycling time to work, etc. I didn't get data on coffee or chicken shops. I did consider it, and would have pulled it from OSM but that data is very incomplete with regards to this sort of data.
I would love to build/use an app that generates RE investment market suggestions based on some of the datapoints you're mentioning. Maybe see if there's some way to automate the analysis of socioeconomic status of the neighborhood with the distribution of various types of businesses and then map price/price delta over time. Might be some cool data in there. Re racism comments...kinda.
the theory is worth very little. you could identify two other random density factors (like cigarette butts and chelsea fans) and come up with some heatmap to identify the best value houses. only time-series data could give some indication and then you would still have to test it (and then the market would price in your findings shortly after they are published. this kind of arbitrage rarely lasts long).
I don't think those are random density factors. I don't believe that darts were thrown at a wall with words written on them and they landed on "Coffee Shops" and "Fried Chicken". I think the analysis started with the assumption that Coffee shops would be found in nicer areas and Fried Chicken would be found in rougher areas. Then the analysis was started to evaluate that hypothesis. It's OK that areas of with different economic conditions may have different types of businesses. Buying a house next to a check cashing shop or a pay day lender will nearly 100% guarantee you aren't living in the best neighborhood.
I don't necessarily agree with the premise of this article, as many other commenters point out.
To offer an alternative, my own theory is that the 'up and coming' areas are cropping up down the Shoreditch fringe, i.e. Borough (which is seeing a lot of commercial and residential development, and Elephant & Castle (same as Borough, albeit more behind in completion). Such a 'fringe' also spills off into the East, too.
You could extrapolate this trend to Peckham, one of the primary areas the author has highlighted, however I doubt we're going to get anywhere near same level of 'pop-up' commerce/entertainment in these much more southernly areas for some time to come indeed.
Clearly this analysis would be a flawed approach to take for the American South. Especially given that right now "hot chicken" places are a hipster fad for the "up and coming" neighborhoods.
In the U.S., a leading indicator of future development in suburban or rural areas is often the self-storage business. They are often built out in the middle of nowhere when land is cheap, and continue operating as other businesses are built nearby.
Many of them are owned by large REITs that are speculating on land values. The business pays the property taxes as the value of the land rises.
Chicken shops flipping to coffee shops may predict urban gentrification, but the self-storage business predicts cornfields turning into Wal*Marts.
This analysis is too broad-brush. Although London has richer and poorer neighborhoods, it is common for luxury property to be right across the street from much cheaper property.
If the assumption is that fried chicken places are a relic of a poorer past, then this metric does not work for New York City. Fried chicken is the food of the moment:
Yeah, confusingly, I live in a currently gentrifying hipster neighborhood of Minneapolis, of all places, and there is a hot new fried chicken restaurant that is always so full you have to wait 2 hours to get a table.
1. This is not even wrong.
2. Fried chicken and coffee shops seem like a proxy for class and race in London and were deliberately chosen by the author.
My office computer is blocking Medium for some reason, but, certainly the choice of a fried chicken joint must be localized?
There's a few regions of the US I've lived where fried chicken isn't really a thing, in general. I'm not sure that'd it would make sense to extend the model to those locations at least.
In the US, fried chicken has very specific associations - it's a classic marker of African-American ethnic food. So it might signify "up-and-coming", but for a very different reason, reflecting racial and ethnic displacement that comes with gentrification in historically-black neighborhoods.
I think you're probably right, the inverse is seen in the US.
In the South fast-food fried chicken is sometimes a marker for not-yet-gentrified areas of a city, but often it isn't. Fried chicken is an ingrained cultural tradition of the south, for both whites and blacks, and if you count any place selling fried chicken in your analysis you're actually likely to see more fried chicken in richer areas. At least that's my anecdotal observation. I live in a section of town that's becoming gentrified and while chains like Zaxby's and Krystal are slowly disappearing, but pretty much every "fine dining" and even casual dining (i.e. one step over Olive garden) place that has some southern-cuisine related riff serves fried chicken
Many of my friends are East London types who can no longer afford to live north of the river, and I have heard Peckham described as "the new Dalston" more than once. Perhaps it's got the right balance of edginess, location and affordability (I don't know Peckham at all).
> Poor on average take worse care of their health and fitness
Not intended to be snarky, as I grok the intent of your comment, but poor also don't typically have time to come home and go for an hour jog with frequency during the week.
Fair enough. But how is it substantially different from the current comment in its place?
"myth_buster 6 hours ago
Poor on average take worse care of their health and fitness
I think it can be primarily attributed to the low income jobs being more physically and emotionally draining which result in them being sapped by the time they reach home.
This can also be witnessed in the amount of nurture they can provide to their offspring. An interesting argument in one of the Quora thread about being rich was that financial freedom let's them have the flexibility to spend more time with their kids"
Is this true? The general stereotype when I lived in the UK is that the poor were mostly non-workers who subsisted based on public assistance. If true, then they have plenty of time.
In the US this is certainly true. The lowest earning category has 30 minutes/day more leisure time than the highest.
In addition to the people working multiple part time minimum wage jobs to get by, there are other time costs associated with being poor.
Poor often don't have a personal vehicle, so many hours per week can be spent on a bus, bike, or walking, especially in places with less public transport.
Now the following probably doesn't apply to poor in cities, where you often have amenities in easy walking distance, but in the area I live they are quite applicable. Every time you need to go pick up groceries, you have to take public transit to the grocery store, and you can only buy what you can carry back, so you'll have to go more often than someone who can load up a trunk. Add on the fact that many low end housing rentals don't have washer/dryer units, the nearest may be miles away, so you get to take public transit with your laundry and spend a couple hours at the laundromat.
Where I'm at, those two things alone could easily eat 10-20 hours of your week.
This is specifically what I was thinking about. Try commuting via public transit for 100% of your daily needs and keep a tally of how much time you spend sitting at stations or stops waiting for connections.
Obviously the city and infrastructure would cause this to vary, but my experience using public bus transit anywhere in the US would be a good hour less (at minimum) of jog-possible leisure time every day. And that's if you live in a relatively convenient transit location (typically not cheap).
You may be able to read a book at a stop, but you aren't jogging / spinning / doing yoga.
If your theory were true, the poor should have less leisure time than the non-poor. Yet according to the ATUS, they don't.
I'll break down why your theories are wrong. Most poor people don't work at all, and many of those who do are only part time. So this idea of "multiple part time minimum wage jobs" applies only to a very small number of people.
74% of poor households actually do have a vehicle (compared to 92% of the country), so that doesn't look like it's a big factor. 65% of the poor have a washing machine (compared to 82% of the country), so again that's probably not driving this gap.
Even if the premises of your theory were true, there would have to be some countervailing factor since the conclusion (that the poor have less leisure time) is wrong.
But maybe the UK is wildly different. Can you present any data sets to demonstrate this?
Your first link is talking about a more specific group of people than I was referring to. It references about 7% of the population, people working at least half of the year who are below the poverty line. The 2013 poverty line was $11,490 for individuals, $23,550 for a family of four. I'd consider twice that to still be poor by any reasonable definition. In my area (around Atlantic City, New Jersey) you'd be lucky to find a two bedroom apartment for $1000/mo. So if a family of four crams into a two bedroom apartment, or an individual splits one with a roommate, that's half the 'poverty level' in rent. Without covering utilities, transportation, food, etc.
As to your second point, I'm sorry, but I simply don't have the time to do the proper research on that one. You may be correct. I was primarily basing on anecdotal evidence from what I've seen and experienced in my local area. The statistics may also not be as clear as one would think. As I said, in my area, someone at twice the poverty level would still struggle to get by, and in many cities, I expect it is significantly more. At the same time, in many rural or semi-rural areas, housing costs become a much smaller factor, which leaves more room for things like a vehicle. Looking at the poor based on the amount of income, without looking at circumstances at an almost individual level is a difficult prospect.
I will also say that it is easy to overlook things that go from a non-issue to a time and effort consuming problem when lack of resources is involved. Lack of transportation or a washer were just two examples that came to mind. Also note that if 74% of poor households have a vehicle, that means 26% do not. That is a fairly significant number, in my eyes.
I'd consider twice that to still be poor by any reasonable definition.
$47,100 is poor? If so, then basically the entire world is poor. The only nations in the world with a median family income (adjusted for cost of living) higher than $47,100 are Luxemborg, Norway and Sweden.
I don't find this definition remotely reasonable.
Anyway, your anecdotal evidence seems to be leading you astray. The actual stats show a) the poor have more free time for exercise or TV watching, b) they prefer TV watching to exercise, c) they don't have a job and d) when they do have a job they don't have a long commute (see table 4-24 in my AHS link).
What evidence, if any, would convince you that your theories about the lifestyle of the poor are wrong?
The numbers may be skewed by retired people which is not absolutely clear in a lot of these data points when people casually cite them online (not saying your sources are).
Working poor is quite common in the US. With chronic unemployment where over time individuals face depression you would be better off correlating depression and low income with downward economic projections rather than free time. Rates of alcoholism and liquor sales may be closer approximations in areas where mental health figures are unreliable due to lack of availability among underserved communities (see: Native reservations, poor rural areas). Where I live, I might be the most depressed but so many do rather poorly economically but the region is consistently polled as rather high on happiness.
Older people (I don't have data on retired vs non-retired) are the least likely to be poor. So if the data is skewed by the retired, it's in the opposite direction.
Working poor is far less common than non-working poor in the US. Non-poor people work a lot more than poor people (hardly surprising, since working brings money and makes you less poor).
However, just based on my prejudices, I'd claim that those that do work crazy hours across three jobs typically do not need to go jogging, they get some exercise when moving from one job to another. They are also not necessarily the poorest in the income poverty sense, although their situation is quite clearly the most unfair.
> However, just based on my prejudices, I'd claim that those that do work crazy hours across three jobs typically do not need to go jogging, they get some exercise when moving from one job to another.
All the hours spent in the tube and in the bus will leave you sore and aching, but that doesn't quite suffice to call it a workout.
That may be reasonable -- though the amount of physical activity in construction jobs also seems to vary a lot; many operators of heavy equipment such as bulldozers or cranes are actually fairly obese. Not to mention the culture of smoking (at least where I live; the difference to general population is noticeable).
I do office work but commute by bike; I'm also not enthusiastic about jogging on top of that.
It would be interesting to see the numbers. At least here in western NYS, I see many lower income people needing to take public transportation due to the lack of a vehicle. Thus, increasing their travel time considerably.
I think the intent of that comment is genuine. There are poor working multiple jobs to make ends meet and their are unemployed or underemployed poor that have tons of free time. There are middle and upper class people that work 100 hours a week and their are middle class people that sneak by on barely 40 hours a week. I do genuinely notice a spike in joggers in more well to do areas.
It may be that people with more money get to spend their time a bit higher on Maslow's hierarchy of needs, but I don't think it's strictly that all poor are busier than all middle or upper class.
In my experience they have the time, but they don't have the knowledge. Also, weight loss is a battle fought and won far more in the kitchen than in the gym. While I would expect a correlation between jogging and eating healthier, I would say the reason that the poor are less healthy has far more to do with eating habits than with exercising habits.
Experience with the eating habits or experience with weight loss being more about what you eat than how you exercise?
Also, my experience with poor individuals includes directly living with them for months and close family who is very poor. I've also known families who don't even qualify for many of the standard welfare benefits due to immigration status.
It's plenty 'racist' here in the UK (at least under the left-wing redefinition of the word racist as any mention of race at all). Chicken shops and jerk chicken are associated with the African-Caribbean population.
All he's done with his analysis is used two thinly disguised proxy variables to hide his true hypothesis, which may very well be a good hypothesis but is unpalatable to discuss in public.
> at least under the left-wing redefinition of the word racist as any mention of race at all
The overcautious avoidance of race as a subject does exist, but is nothing to do with left/right in my experience. I associate it with people who don't live in mixed areas, they tend to be more awkward about mentioning race and certainly aren't more left wing on average.
Even under your redefinition of racist, the article isn't racist. The author doesn't make any mention of race at all. Anybody correlating food and drink with a skin colour is projecting their own racist connotations.
They might spike while gentrification is ongoing, especially in the early stages. My hypothesis for this statement is that more affluent people are: 1. More likely to be robbed (ie: they have items that others want), and 2. More likely to report crimes against them to the police. (ie: They trust the authorities, and they might need police reports to file insurance claims (affluent people are more likely to insure their property))
This does not solely reflect lower socioeconomic standing as Pakistani + Bangladeshi communities have higher levels of poverty, and similarly poor areas of cities in Wales and Scotland do not have the same proportionate level of gun crime that occurs in London.
Yes, the basis for the hypothesis is fried chicken -> black people and craft coffee -> white hipsters.
But that's actually what happens with gentrification. Diverse neighbourhoods get plowed over with rich white people.
Using race in an analysis doesn't make it racist. OP saying they wouldn't want to live in the places with fried chicken, in the context above (KFC->black people) would be.
I'd say the piece itself rides the line. It has a sarcastic tone throughout the piece, more of a "let's find out where the gentrification is" than "let's go live there".
"the basis for the hypothesis is fried chicken -> black people and craft coffee -> white hipsters"
Unless I missed something in the article (please feel free to chew me out if I missed it...) you have just completely put words in the author's mouth. I have no idea where you got that correlation from, but I don't see it anywhere in the blog post.
Here's to hoping that you're just trolling. Your reply injects very specific racial and socio-economic biases as if they were already assumed and understood. Which, in this context, is basically racism.
Because the parent comment stated "Yes, the basis for the hypothesis is fried chicken -> black people and craft coffee -> white hipsters" as if it were a matter of fact. The blog post makes no mention of skin colour at all (that I can see) and the racial connotations are entirely those of the parent - hence injecting racial bias.
I spent one sentence (the middle one) out of the three sentences in my reply explaining why I thought it could be (please note, "could be", as in, I did not say it was, as in, I did not accuse) interpreted as such. My reasoning was perfectly explicit and plain.
The neighborhoods gentrying in Chicago right now aren't Black > White. They're Latino/Mixed > White/Mixed. There's no friend chicken places to go out of business. If anything craft friend chicken is popular now and entering the gentrified neighborhoods.
A more rational metric would be payday loan stores, laundromats, budget cell phone stores, etc.
That's empirically false. "Racism" is whatever speech will convince enough people to call you "racist", and one person in twenty is more than enough to do it.
Whats empirically false changes person to person and culture to culture as demonstrated by your arbitrary definition of racism. I do not define Racism as actions other find racist.
I'm not interested in a debate about the meaning of truth - replace empirical correctness with everyday practicality and my point stands. You're free to define the term "racism" however you want to. However, you might regret ignoring your personal and cultural context if you care about not getting called racist.
Have their opinions ever really mattered to the "majority?" Any clear thinking person looking at history (both distant and recent) would conclude mostly no.
I daresay there are aspects of both income distribution and other factors that favor or disfavor big box stores generally. No, a Walmarts footprint probably doesn't work for San Francisco proper but that doesn't really explain the relative lack of Walmarts in the Silicon Valley sprawl compared to the East Bay.
I've never really understood the nature of this stereotype - who doesn't at least like fried chicken? It's like saying, 'You know the Mexicans, they just love ice cream.' Of course they do, it's ice cream.
If you paint a swastika on a synagogue people will be upset, but not because they dislike shapes with 90 degree angles. If you say that black people love fried chicken people will be upset, but not because liking fried is unique to black people or inherently bad. It's mostly because it's a stereotype associated with a period in US history when it was socially acceptable for a white mob to lynch a black man for being rude.
The fried chicken stereotype exists for blacks, not non-whites. It's a popular southern food, and the origin of the stereotype goes back to the time of slavery. Chickens were one of the few animals slaves were allowed to raise on their own and the dish was easy and cheap to make.
Exactly.
I hadn't even thought of this as being racist until I started reading comments here- in London especially, KFC ripoffs aren't a race thing, they're a class thing.
I'm reasonably sensitive to people being racist, but given that this article is about London, I'm finding it hard to see the racism.
Africans and Jamaicans do in Canada, all those hipster coffee shops where they hand make each cup and charge $6/cup are full of Caribbean and Somalian diaspora. All the weed cafes run by Jamaicans all serve Blue Mountain coffee too and the rasta behind the counter will go on endlessly about it's health benefits if you ask them.
I'm not sure why this is getting downvoted. We are talking about stereotypes here, and this is clearly a stereotype that's around - see the "hipster in coffee bar" "memes" in which portrayed people are exclusively white.
Stereotype of African Americans is that they eat a lot of fried chicken so essentially this report would imply it is African Americans that make for a bad neighborhood.
The vast majority of restaurants serving chicken nuggets, which is what was tracked, are burger joints, not chicken shacks. Author knows exactly what he's doing.
He's literally using fried chicken as an extremely thinly veiled way of measuring the number of black people in an area.
This is a good article on why "fried chicken" when paired with other things can be racist. [1] Since "up and coming" is basically code for gentrifying, it shouldn't be that hard to see why this is actually racist.
Your argument falls down because this is in the UK, where fried chicken doesn't have racial connotations. He's using it to measure the number of working class people.
He's literally not. Your article says that fried chicken is racist because people keep assuming that black people eat fried chicken. And here you are assuming that when someone says "fried chicken" they actually mean "black people". You're doing exactly what the article you linked is condemning.
Yup. This is the kind of person you run into of among gen-x gen-y and millennial neo-hipsters. Calling others racist while connecting dots that really just reveals their own bias. Same kind of person that claims 'systemic' racism everywhere when really they themselves treat or refer to minorities as needing special coddling. Immediately when someone uses 'gentrifying' in a conversation you find they are the racist when you start boiling them down. They are the worst kind because they think they are some protector class of minorities but they are just full of themselves and like to keep token friends but as soon as they earn a dollar are just as apt to move in our out of a neighborhood. In other words they don't want to believe what's both in front of and behind their own eyes.
Interestingly enough, the most popular item on Chinese take-out menus (General Tso's Chicken) is fried chicken with sugary glaze. If you combine the most popular American Chinese dishes which are fried chicken (Sesame Chicken, Sweet and Sour Chicken, Orange Chicken) into one group then you could consider American Chinese food basically just fried chicken shops.
There is a trend across the US mall food courts of Chinese quickserve shops evolving into pairs of such along side "Cajun" shops selling essentially the same food.
But still, American "fried chicken" really implies "on the bone"
In the US I would try to figure out whatever the region's blue collar / working poor's food choices might be. Usually it's big label fast food franchises but there are locality-specific ones. In the southeast where I am, barbecue places are rather common and eaten frequently yet absent from a lot of affluent communities even though it's a traditional food that's eaten across socioeconomic barriers.
Wasn't meant as sarcasm, but maybe my experience is colored by living in NYC. Chinese take-outs are common in poorer neighborhoods there. It's not difficult to find blocks that have more than one.
for cities in central europe like berlin, munich, vienna the indicators for poor neighborhoods are mobile-phone repairshops, internet cafés and kebab/döner/falafel places. immigrants from the south-east, from turkey to afghanistan shaping these areas.
as nicely illustrated in the current episodes of Homeland.
in greater LA, fried chicken is actually a new trend in higher-end casual dining, because of the east asian influence on local cuisine (korean, japanese, taiwanese).
oftentimes it's served out of coffee shops. or tea houses. go figure.
When I moved to London's SE4 postcode three years ago (it's pretty close to Peckham, FWIW), the regeneration of the area has just started and the more middle-class looking people appeared around, the more men and women in running gear were visible in the streets in the morning. Poor on average take worse care of their health and fitness, so tapping into Runkeeper's data may prove useful.
In the meanwhile, during these three years, the value of my home grew more than 100%.