This is scientific American's 60 second science. I'm Christopher Intalyata. Got a minute?

Urban gentrification is thought to happen like this.

Artists move into lower income neighborhoods looking for cheap gallery and living space.

So they move into these neighborhoods and they make those neighborhoods really pleasant to live in.

They kind of create a nice kind of buzzy scene.

Chenuki Saracinia, a data scientist at the Warwick Business School in the UK.

Next she says come the hip cafes and shops.

Well what happens is of course other people are also then attracted to move into these areas so the

demand for these places increase the housing prices then go up. So the story

goes but Sarah Sunia and her colleagues wanted to see if online data told the same story. So they analyzed

four and a half million photos uploaded to Flickr from 2004 to 2013, each of them

geotagged somewhere in London.

Then they tallied how many of each neighborhood's photos were tagged art.

And they found that neighborhoods with a higher proportion of art tagged photos

actually did see a higher spike in property prices during the study period.

The results are in the Journal of Royal Society Open Science.

Foursquare and Twitter data can also track gentrification trends,

as another recent study showed.

But the link here isn't necessarily predictive.

Maybe neighborhoods with rising prices just attract more photo tagging art enthusiasts.

That's why I wouldn't say, you know, go out and buy a house in an arts neighborhood.

You're going to be rich in five years' time, because sometimes there could be other factors

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