# Coffee shops vs. fried chicken

By [Brandon Donnelly](https://paragraph.com/@brandondonnelly), 2016-04-21

architect-this-city, atc, athiscity, central-london, cities, coffee-shops, development, friend-chicken, gentrification, home-prices, housing, london, real-estate, real-estate-market, sam-floy, uncategorized, up-and-coming, urban-change, urbanism

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When it comes to a real estate market, there are always the typical metrics: sale prices, rents, vacancy and so on. But I’m always interested when somebody looks at the market in a different way and comes up with other kinds of metrics.

That’s why I was intrigued when I stumbled upon [this post by Sam Floy](https://medium.com/@Sam_Floy/how-to-know-if-where-you-live-is-up-and-coming-fried-chicken-vs-coffee-shops-546080119f98#.pzzmvtfib), where he looks at the concentration of coffee shops and friend chicken shops across London in order to determine which neighborhoods are in fact “up and coming.”

To give you a taste, here’s his coffee shop map:

![](https://storage.googleapis.com/papyrus_images/b2f9a57371f7b0bb6353abbaf7cc7451.png)

His thinking was that if a neighborhood had a high density of coffee shops, a low density of fried chicken shops, and relatively low house prices, then it could probably be thought of as up and coming. 

Coffee shops are often considered to be [leading indicators of urban change](http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/apr/08/coffee-shops-gentrification-urban-change) (i.e. gentrification), and, well, friend chicken places I guess speak to a different kind of neighborhood.

These sorts of playful studies aren’t going to tell you exactly which numbers you should be plugging into your development pro forma. But I think unconventional analyses can sometimes tell you a bit more of the story behind the numbers.

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*Originally published on [Brandon Donnelly](https://paragraph.com/@brandondonnelly/coffee-shops-vs-fried-chicken)*