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Comment by ubernostrum | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

Being london, fried chicken shops attract late night drunken folk wandering around doing what late night drunken folk will do.

Only if they are open late at night. Last time I was in London there wasn't much after a certain time.

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.

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