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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.
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).
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.
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.
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
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Couldn't you use like, Google Maps?
I don't know. Is there a way in the API of requesting all coffee shops?
Inspiring assumption... I don't think Peckham is exactly your dream area :)
https://www.google.com/maps/@51.4739728,-0.067718,3a,75y,268...
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.
Peckham is up and coming though, so it seems to have worked to some extent, albeit a year too late.
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.