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.
