Tuesday, 14 February 2012

New data on neighbourliness

Rightmove indexRightmove’s ‘Happy at Home Index’ for UK towns has received quite a bit of publicity, mostly pointing gleefully or disparagingly at towns regarded among the ‘happiest’ or ‘unhappiest’. It illustrates how competition between localities for contented residents has become a theme of policy and media attention.

The company has generated an index using 12 measures to assess how people feel about where they live, covering aspects of their property, subjective feelings about their home, and sense of community.

The four questions used for the ‘community’ category seem pretty good to me and are worth reproducing here.

Rightmove community questions
Apparently Dorchester scored highest for neighbourliness and Ilford scored lowest, but I’m not sure it’s helpful to dwell on these rankings.

One might have wanted to see something in there about the local economy and transport: and there’s nothing anywhere in the index to allow for people’s feelings about the value of their council tax and services.

But the survey had a whopping 25,340 respondents and a ten-point scale for each question, so there could be some interesting work to be done on the relations between some of the measures, if the data can be made available.


14 Feb 2012 12:24:35 | Neighbourhood relations

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Pubs and taverns According to the Lost Pubs Project, in the UK pubs are currently closing at an accelerating rate of 50 each week. While there's been a fair amount of froth around parliament (eg), acknowledging the implications and condemning the tied pub model, there doesn't seem to have been much to challenge the trend. Apparently something similar has been happening in Chicago. This article suggests the problem is mainly down to the sheer bureaucratic awkwardness of getting a license. One commentator complains: "Getting a new tavern license issued in a residential neighborhood is brutal. It's virtually impossible." The problem sweetly illustrates the extent to which social value, publicness and local economies are intertwined. Perhaps policy makers everywhere could appreciate and value the role of pubs in stimulating local social capital, as well as their role in the local economy. Here's a start: Scott Martin who owns Simon's Tavern in Andersonville, Chicago, says that when he bought the place 17 years ago, he found a shoebox containing $80,000 in IOUs. Previously: More on local pubs Why pubs need the CIA
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97 per cent of neighbouring surveys say neighbouring ain’t what it used to be The chorus of popular survey reports lamenting the decline of neighbouring continues to swell and boom. I don’t scour for them systematically, but I have at least half a dozen per year from the last few years. What I most long for is the moment when one of my neighbours rushes in to tell me about new survey results they've just found, showing that X per cent of neighbours share information with each other. Today’s survey results come from the Ordnance Survey, although since there’s nothing about it on their website thus far, I can’t tell you what they think it shows, nor why they had it carried out. Here are the headlines: 35% of those surveyed do not know their neighbours’ names 29% said lack of community spirit and anti-behaviour (sic) were the two biggest problems in their neighbourhood 17% of parents in the study stated they never let their children play outside 11% said they rarely or never visit their high street 25% said a community forum where they could air their concerns would help tackle community issues, whilst 29% claimed that a source of local information would help tackle community issues. As always, it’s hard to comment without seeing the questions, especially on the first two of these points (all neighbours’ names? Any neighbours’ names? Some neighbours’ names?). Perhaps they will be made available in due course. I promise to do an extended update of my previous review of popular surveys, because I do think there are things we might learn from them. A related but separate phenomenon to examine is the media-political obsession with telling us how we are no longer neighbourly, and we all were, unfailingly, in the past of course. They chant the mantras, hoping to light upon some magic combination that will cure all social ills. My thanks to the dependable Chris Gittins of Streets Alive who offered some commonsense observations when interviewed about the issues on BBC Breakfast this morning.

Kevin Harris

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