Was thinking about this yesterday and wondering if there was some equivalent of "bitcoin days destroyed" [2] for non-bitcoin title-changes. As in, BDD is a measure of turnover in Bitcoin-land, where the movement of an asset is weighted more highly the longer it was at rest. So with Bitcoin, higher values are good, because they probably mean more hoarded bitcoins are moving.
So the thought was that changes in land title, or long-standing businesses changing owners, or long-standing tenants moving out -- that these sorts of changes might be useful in predicting gentrification.
Obviously, a land-title registry on a blockchain would give this for free, but at least in my city, land titles are very costly to search. But changes in business ownership (small businesses opening and closing at given addresses) might be doable for cheap. Could do a community survey of businesses to find out how long they've been around, then simply track the "permanently_closed" boolean flag for all businesses within the bounding box, to keep track of when things are closing.
Anyhow, still need to do some research to find out whether this would be a useful indicator, but I'm optimistic. Curious about folks' thoughts!
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_land_trust [2]: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/845/what-are-bit...