Why Great Britain Residents Live Where They Do | Hacker News Reader

Why Great Britain Residents Live Where They Do

citylab.com

23 pointsingve29 comments

A lesson in how to lie with graphs in this article. The percentage supposedly represented by the boxes is indicated using the width of the box, but the human eye instinctively uses the area. That's how you can make 30% look 4 times larger than 15%, through the cunning manipulation of square laws.

Yeah - whenever I see things like this, I make the assumption that they are deliberately trying to deceive - there's no way you can accidentally design a graph like that

CityLab is a mission driven organization that is obviously for city living based on their recent articles. Fortunately when they manipulate the presentation of data the way they do it becomes obvious to those in the know what they are up to.

However, the data contained in this article provides evidence of what the planning community is constantly trying to overcome: How do we keep the mid-age and retirement individuals from leaving the city?

The graphs here were completely useless to me, so I made my own.

http://imgur.com/4Qk0zHB (an area chart)

http://imgur.com/4Qk0zHB (normalised so the Y axis is always 100. A bit of a kludge as the data didn't add up to 100 (suggesting the survey respondents could answer more than one reason), but it gives a bit of a picture of the data)

Data here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1gMUU38OPlt4hMbUUdDCe...

Stacked graphs are really hard to parse. You have all of these lines going up and down even when no upward or downward trend is present. It would probably be better to just create 10 small barcharts (one for each reason) and then put those underneath each other.

(Both of your imgur links are the same.)

Not very much surprising in here, including the overwhelming preponderance of London. London is popular not only because of job availability but because it has much better public transport than almost every other UK city. This is because it gets a disproportionate share of public money for it.

http://blogs.new.spectator.co.uk/2013/12/london-is-different...

http://www.transportnorth.org.uk/london-versus-the-regions/r...

Seems like a bit of chicken-and-egg problem; overcrowded city leads to better public transport, which leads to more overcrowding, which leads to...

Except that London is becoming unaffordable, even on middle class salaries.

The average monthly rent is over £1500, which is more than half the average monthly salary - and somewhere between two-thirds and three-quarters of average take home pay after tax.

And if you look at the boroughs that the professionals actually live in you can almost double that.

This is how you get 4 people who make over double the average salary having to share a place just to afford rent while being able to preserve even a notion of savings.

The problem is that most places around the m25 with easy access to London aren't that cheaper these days to rent in when you count the 3-5k yearly commute costs.

So even the suburbs and satellite towns are becoming unaffordable.

That's more than half the average monthly gross salary.

To get £3,000/mo take home pay you'd need to earn £49,500/year.

Sure, but being unaffordable to live in doesn't stop a city being crowded. I work in zone 1 and commute in from zone 6, adding to the congestion. I suppose the overcrowding only reduces when it's not only unaffordable to live in London, but also to commute in.

It's only getting worse both Facebook (just where i work Euston Tower/Reagents Park Business Center) and Google (building a mega office near kings cross) are moving in with quite a few others following them just going to make things worse. The City of London want's to bring even more big companies into the heart of London and they are throwing tax intensives left and right.

London has the density to make public transport schemes effective. The same objective BCR criteria are used everywhere - it's just that the benefits of building e.g. a train line between two villages of 100 people are never going to add up.

Hmm. [citation needed] on the cost/benefit being applied evenly in practice, I think. As the sibling comment says, it's something of a self-fulfilling prophecy, the limit case of which would be an arcology of extremely dense, extremely expensive housing surrounded by cardboard slums.

And I'm not talking about "two villages of 100 people", I'm talking about such remote, unknown locations as Manchester and Birmingham (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxZ1xn2ml10 may help explain Birmingham to Americans)

A very big factor is that London gets to have a proper state-owned local-government-controlled integrated public transport service, TfL. Most other places have to put up with private local monopoly bus services run by Stagecoach.

> the limit case of which would be an arcology of extremely dense, extremely expensive housing surrounded by cardboard slums.

If having people live close to each other is economically beneficial - and it seems to be - then social policy should encourage that. It's much easier to move the people to the jobs than the other way around (see e.g. the report discussed in http://www.theguardian.com/news/blog/2008/aug/13/timetoaband... ). Even in the "crazy" limit, if we ended up abandoning the rest of the country and moving everyone to London because we were more productive when we were all closer together... well, why not?

(cardboard slums are unlikely; houses outside London are cheap and large precisely because they're less well connected. More likely outside the arcology would be retirement mansions or the like)

> A very big factor is that London gets to have a proper state-owned local-government-controlled integrated public transport service, TfL. Most other places have to put up with private local monopoly bus services run by Stagecoach.

Manchester has a very similar body, and the other PTEs are also fairly similar. Several cities had referenda on establishing elected mayors with similar authority to that of London. A lot of TfL's advantages are simply a reflection of London's willingness to spend money funding them (e.g. Crossrail is partly funded by an extra business levy).

This is all changing. There's substantial devolution of transport power to integrated metropolitan authorities in Birmingham, Manchester, and other cities, and also TFL's subsidy is being eliminated. From this point onwards, the only thing which remains to mark out London from other cities is Crossrail, really.

> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxZ1xn2ml10

> The uploader has not made this video available in your country.

Perhaps not so useful after all.

I'm a white middle class professional who grew up in the suburbs, launched career in urban environments, lived in London for 12 years, then fled to the country. I now live in a totally rural location. Moving out of London to live in the country is a common middle class trajectory in the UK, but this article completely fails to capture that.

The charts place the move-to-the-country stage of life at age 55+.

I made the jump at 44, after three burglaries and one knifepoint mugging in the same year. Ahead of the game for once!

Agreed, think the article title is misleading because it implies it covers everybody whereas it only really covers people who live in cities. The PDF cited in the article with a title of "Urban demographics - Why people live where they do" is more accurate.

Stories like these are great to look for what the author is omitting and what propaganda is being pushed.

  "Residents in suburbs, who tend to be over 30 with children, said they live 
  there because of the cost, size and type of their housing, to be close to 
  good schools,and because of the safety and security of the neighbourhood."

The city infrastructure, the very things it is supposed to do, is inadequate for its citizens needs: it cannot provide good schools, safety, or security.

I would like to note that this article is not the usual puff piece from Citylab and this documents with further evidence a common theme that we all know:

a. young: live the hipster lifestyle in the city

b. mid-age: live the family lifestyle in the suburbs

c. old-age: live the retirement lifestyle in the country.

You can say British instead of Great Britain Residents;

Not everyone who lives in the UK is a British National

but aren't they residents anyways?(not tourists for course) as in British resident someone that resides/lives in GB?

Isn't that why the article uses that phrase?

What is "British" isn't always immediately graspable (hence the article's explicit use of "Great Britain", which is well defined). Here's a useful diagram:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/28/Br...

Some of the most expensive housing in London is owned by people who aren't British, aren't resident, and don't even live in the houses.

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/jan/31/inside-london...

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