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Comment by nonrandomstring | Hacker News Reader

Some factors rapidly changing in UK cities are

- Empty offices since the pandemic

- Disappearance of the high-street due to Amazon

- New "In-between" builds

Most British cities still have empty or skeleton-crewed office buildings. That can't be sustainable. Surely these will be sold off as housing.

Shops are vanishing at a terrifying rate. Some city centres are boarded up and only charity shops, Tesco minimarts and tattoo/nail bars remain.

Every tiny plot of land is being sold off to developers to "fill in" with profitable (but in my reckoning totally unneeded) housing. This is changing public footpaths and cycle cut-throughs and squeezing the density of some areas.

I think any metric of "livability" would be in flux and likely to change in many British cities.

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>sold off to developers to "fill in" with profitable (but in my reckoning totally unneeded) housing

I have no idea what "unneeded" housing is. Are these units sitting empty?

YoY house price growth in the UK is running at around 10%. I am not aware of a glut of "unneeded" housing.

Yeah, every extra unit contributes to increasing the supply of housing and therefore decreasing the cost, which at this point has reached crisis levels.

> Disappearance of the high-street due to Amazon

My own anectdata, but I've made the opposite observation. At least in my hometown (~10k population), I've been pleasantly surprised at just how resilient the high-street has been. In the past year, we've had a new bakery, a new arts and craft shop, a new cafe, and the farmer's market is going from strength to strength.

While several years ago, I would order relentlessly from the likes of Amazon, I've found myself purchasing local goods in local stores far more, and am better off for it.

> I've been pleasantly surprised at just how resilient the high-street has been. In the past year, we've had a new bakery, a new arts and craft shop, a new cafe, and the farmer's market is going from strength to strength.

That's awesome. To qualify my comments, I've also seen some of that change. New shops I've noticed filling in are

- a bike repair shop

- a "slow living" craft shop

- a tailors/upholsterer

- a fishmonger (haven't had one for 20+ years around here)

But in my town (city >300k) the decline has been significant with large chains, banks, clothing and brand retail shuttering up.

I do my best to support local trade and petit commerce. The ability to use cash and just browse in spare time is a factor.

I think it’s a it of winner takes all paradigm. The good places are getting better and average places decline as business and wealth moves to the better places, driving up prices.

Banks disappearing is awesome though. They're a blight and the small branches offer usurious services almost exclusively.

Large chains being replaced by smaller establishments would be great but I don't have high hopes here.

I don't see them as a blight. I just am always rather amazed how much prime real estate bank branches take up. Yes, people need bank services now and then and often want a convenient branch to conduct business in. But I know I like doubtless many/most others, rarely use an ATM any longer much less go into a branch to interact with a human. Even the very small city nearest to me has 3 or 4 different bank branches in its tiny downtown.

A cluster of new shops isn't necessarily a sign of boom though, that's also how it looks like when landlords still haven't yet failed finding substitute renters in an ever accelerating sequence of try-and-fail. I know places where the same "newly opened!" signs in the windows keep getting reused since the aughts.

I agree with your point.

But I wanted to add that with the exception of empty offices due to COVID all other problems didn't change that rapidly, IMO.

These have been slowly building up since Gideon's austerity and in almost all deprived areas in the UK, you could play the Charity/Fried Chicken/Bookies/Boarded shop drinking game for at least a decade.

> only charity shops, Tesco minimarts and tattoo/nail bars remain

And gambling shops. I noticed a large increase in those.

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