1/ Footfall in central London is still down 69%, but has picked up elsewhere
2/ This is driven by working patterns, but that in itself plays out in two distinct ways:
First, job type. Staff are returning to the workplace at very different rates in different sectors, and the sectors with the most remote working today are clustered in cities, esp. London
3/ Workers in retail, hospitality can’t do their jobs remotely and have returned to the workplace. They’re popping out for lunch or drinks near work and maybe shopping centrally before going home.
In big cities, office-workers are still at home, leaving the high streets empty.
4/ But a bigger factor than what jobs people do is how they get to work, and how far they travel.
The bulk of the divergence is driven by commuting.
There’s a clear relationship between a city/town’s footfall and the % of its workers who usually commute on trains, buses or Tube
5/ People who usually walk or drive have been much more comfortable resuming their commute than those who take public transport.
Car trips are almost back to normal, but train and Tube travel are below 40% of their baseline, and buses below 60%.
6/ That’s 100,000s of people who would usually be piling onto trains to spend time & money in city centres but are now staying home, spending locally instead.
This is a boon for suburban retailers etc, but potentially fatal for their cousins in the business district.
7/ Let’s look at the top-line numbers again:
Almost every city or town saw an uptick in high street footfall over summer as people returned to work, but London’s was barely perceptible.
I’m not sure people fully realise how commuter-reliant central London’s high streets are...
9/ Even if we zoom right into the very core of London — Cities of London & Westminster — a huge portion of its daily workforce usually travels in by train, Tube and or bus.
~80% of the people who usually spend money in its shops & hospitality are just ... not there anymore.
10/ The big question: is this a temporary blip that will spring back to normality post-Covid (whenever that may be), or are people (and employers) settling into a new normal?
NEW: my column this week is about the coming vibe shift, from Boomers vs Millennials to huge wealth inequality *between* Millennials.
Current discourse centres on how the average Millennial is worse-off than the average Boomer was, but the richest millennials are loaded 💸🚀
That data was for the UK, but it’s a similar story in the US. The gap between the richest and poorest Millennials is far wider than it was for Boomers. More debt at the bottom, and much more wealth at the top.
In both countries, inequality is overwhelmingly *within* generations, not between them.
And how have the richest millennials got so rich?
Mainly this: enormous wealth transfers from their parents, typically to help with buying their first home.
In the UK, among those who get parental help, the top 10% got *£170,000* towards their house (the average Millennial got zero).
American politics is in the midst of a racial realignment.
I think this is simultaneously one of the most important social trends in the US today, and one of the most poorly understood.
Last week, an NYT poll showed Biden leading Trump by less than 10 points among non-white Americans, a group he won by almost 50 points in 2020.
Averaging all recent polls (thnx @admcrlsn), the Democrats are losing more ground with non-white voters than any other demographic.
People often respond to these figures with accusations of polling error, but this isn’t just one rogue result.
High quality, long-running surveys like this from Gallup have been showing a steepening decline in Black and Latino voters identifying as Democrats for several years.
The politics of America’s housing issues in one chart:
• People and politicians in blue states say they care deeply about the housing crisis and homelessness but keep blocking housing so both get worse
• Red states simply permit loads of new homes and have no housing crisis
And if you were wondering where London fits into this...
It builds even less than San Francisco, and its house prices have risen even faster.
That cities like London & SF (and the people who run them) are considered progressive while overseeing these situations is ... something
Those charts are from my latest column, in which I argue that we need to stop talking about the housing crisis, and start talking about the planning/permitting crisis, because it’s all downstream from that ft.com/content/de34df…
NEW: we often talk about an age divide in politics, with young people much less conservative than the old.
But this is much more a British phenomenon than a global one.
40% of young Americans voted Trump in 2020. But only 10% of UK under-30s support the Conservatives. Why?
One factor is that another narrative often framed as universal turns out to be much worse in the UK: the sense that young generations are getting screwed.
Young people are struggling to get onto the housing ladder in many countries, but the crisis is especially deep in Britain:
It’s a similar story for incomes, where Millennials in the UK have not made any progress on Gen X, while young Americans are soaring to record highs.
Young Brits have had a much more visceral experience of failing to make economic progress.