
Can AI Predict the Next Area to Gentrify? - laurex
https://www.citylab.com/life/2018/12/gentrification-london-ai-machine-learning/578329/
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bencollier49
Given that a bloke with a list of fried chicken shops and coffee houses can do
it for London, I reckon the answer is 'yes'.

[https://medium.com/@Sam_Floy/how-to-know-if-where-you-
live-i...](https://medium.com/@Sam_Floy/how-to-know-if-where-you-live-is-up-
and-coming-fried-chicken-vs-coffee-shops-546080119f98)

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zwischenzug
That's funny - I literally couldn't find a coffee shop in Peckham yesterday
while my kids were at the cinema.

Plenty of lunatics, drug-takers, and drunks, though.

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goodmachine
Seriously? If you were at the Peckhamplex then you were 100 yards from three
or four hipster joints, at least.

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zwischenzug
Probably made a mistake going to the high street.

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14113
Really? There are at least two coffee places within ten metres of the train
station on Rye Lane, right across from the Cinema. You're talking absolute
rubbish.

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Xcelerate
It is well known that the stock market is extremely difficult to predict,
because any model that has an advantage quickly loses that advantage once it
is put into practice.

Real estate, however, has not traditionally had the intense sort of
algorithmic focus that the stock market has had. Are there still opportunities
to profit based on obvious patterns, and if so, why hasn't this generally been
done already? Lack of available of real estate data perhaps? I would think a
hedge fund would have no problem contacting a few hundred MLS for the
necessary listing data though.

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someguydave
Real estate is very expensive to transact. Certainly one could not execute
short term trading strategies like is common with securities markets.

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adrianN
Don't you usually start a derivative market if the transaction costs of the
original market are too high?

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zwischenzug
Derivative of what, though? There's no index to track that people will agree
on or can't be gamed.

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dagw
In the US there's the Case-Schiller index which is the underlying for several
classes of derivatives.

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kkhire
i can predict it with near 100% accuracy anywhere in the world. just show me
where all the artists and musicians in your city hangout and pay less than
900/mo on rent.

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megaremote
> just show me where all the artists and musicians in your city hangout and
> pay less than 900/mo on rent.

Well, that is the trick bit.

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visarga
That's where Google and FB have an advantage. They track everyone's location
and interests. They could probably do it.

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paganel
> That's where Google and FB have an advantage. They track everyone's location
> and interests

I was thinking about this two summers ago when there was that migration
“crisis” in Europe, i.e. that Facebook knew better than anyone else on the
planet how many immigrants there were (give or take) and especially from where
exactly they were coming (that was a very contentious point back then) based
on their location data and on the location data of their friends and families
left at home. Come to think of it, I bet they could also “guess” the general
level of education for many of those immigrants, that was also a very, very
hot topic back then.

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Lio
Personally I’m less interested in looking for neighbourhoods where
gentrification is going on than I am to discover what makes places become “not
sketchy”.

What small changes influence the crime levels and feel of a place when walking
around that could improve it for everyone living there?

When those things improve house prices naturally rise.

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nkozyra
Isn't that effectively the same thing? The long tail of gentrification is
rising prices and ( _somewhat_ ) lowered crime.

I've long suspected you can predict this with ML given the right features but
also realized you don't really need any autonomous process, it's generally an
understood pattern.

Perhaps if you wanted to buy thousands of properties across the country.

* I've long noticed that people in gentrified areas will accept higher crime rates not just because the inevitability of being right next to a not-yet-gentrified area, but because it makes their area feel more "real" or "gritty."

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bmurray7jhu
The authors of the cited study posted their ipython notebook on github:

[https://github.com/jreades/urb-studies-predicting-
gentrifica...](https://github.com/jreades/urb-studies-predicting-
gentrification/blob/master/08-Neighbourhood%20Prediction.ipynb)

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mrweasel
Based on Betteridge's law, I would say “no”. At least not reliably.

