“Let’s move to Brockley”

https://amp.theguardian.com/money/2017/jul/28/lets-move-to-brockey-south-east-london

Yes let’s all move to Brockley and make the Overground even more unbearable and overcrowded during peak hours!

You do realise that most of the time someone can only move to Brockley if someone else has moved out, don’t you?

Not necessarily. People moving out are more likely to be older or have non-central London jobs. Can afford to live in Brockley because they have been there for decades. Therefore not as likely to commute to central London everyday.

Whereas the people moving in, paying market rates, have to produce more of an income to sustain it. Therefore more likely to be commuting to central London.

In addition, property that was considered not a commutable distance from the station 5-10 years ago is a perfectly acceptable walk by today’s standards. So you have more and more land/property considered viable distance from the station.

Is your first sentence actually true or an assumption?

ONS statistics. If you look at the other age categories they are all the same except for 20-29. There are also plenty of articles that talk about people with working class jobs (eg: teachers, police, NHS) moving out. Those are the jobs that are typically not located in central London.

And apparently they’re being replaced by bankers, according to this anecdotal quote chosen by the Guardian:

I think the Guardian is in a bit of a schism here, simultaneously pushing two conflicting narratives in various opinion pieces. The paper needs to decide: a) have recent national developments destroyed London’s finance sector for good? or b) is London currently seeing a finance jobs renaissance, with bankers flooding in and replacing beleaguered nurses and teachers?

It’s the overground that has made Brockley etc very favourable to people in the first place! Our house has trebled in value over the 18 years that we have lived here & it’s down mainly to the overground!
It has to be professionals (i.e. Bankers or other higher paid work) to be able to live round here now & of course they are going to work in central London, which is now out of reach price wise for most of us!

The article you’ve cited is talking about people moving out of the capital, not to zone 2/3 borders, and across London as a whole not just out corners. More dubiously, they appear to be quoting an Economist article from 2014 then backing it up with comments from estate agents rather than actually referencing primary data.

Of the people who have moved into our street in the past 3 years, in all instances larger family groups have been replaced with couples. I admit this is just anecdotal, but frankly has the same or more evidential value that the recycled “journalism” displayed in that article.

Let’s not encourage antipathy towards newcomers on the basis of very tenuous evidence at best.

Could not agree more. The Overground made a huge difference - anyone working in the City or Canary Warf could not get to either in 20 minutes or less on the tube, and many people moved from more expensive parts of London (a lot of London!).