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".
