Dionysia Lambiri

High street performance and evolution: a brief guide to the evidence

This guide is a summary of the evidence on recent high street and town centre performance. It is designed to help those developing local policies and strategies for these areas. British town centres and high streets have undergone dramatic change over the last decade. Few would dispute the combined impact of long-term shifts in policy, demographics and transport with the medium and shorter-term impacts of online retail and the shockwave of economic crisis on our high streets. But for those charged with understanding these changes more fully and coming up with effective responses, hard evidence is not always easy to come by. Recognising this need, the Future High Streets Forum co-commissioned with the Economic and Social Research Council(ESRC) a study of the available evidence base, led by Southampton University and funded by the ESRC. Working with experts across the field, the Southampton study reviews what robust evidence is available on the trends impacting high streets and town centres, and provides a guide to how those trends have changed, and will continue to change, those vital commercial and social spaces. This will be invaluable for those developing local policies and strategies to sustain the economic health and vitality of town centres and high streets. The study also identifies the most significant gaps in evidence.

The effect of tourism on the housing market

The aim of this chapter is to examine the way theoretical and empirical literature has looked at the effect of tourism on housing markets in resort destinations. We note that while research on tourism recognizes the effects of recreation activities on local land and housing markets, studies focusing specifically on this issue are very limited. For the purposes of the present work, we first identify the various actors/participants in housing markets and explain how they interact in the context of tourism destinations. Then, we focus on two core strands of relevant research: first, we examine the hedonic price method, as a mechanism to explore how tourism-related amenities can be “quantified” and developed into one of the variables that affect directly and indirectly (through quality-of-life considerations) house price formation in tourism destinations. In the same context, with the use of a case study, we also review an alternative way to quantify the effects of tourism, through the creation of a composite tourism index that enters directly into the house price estimation function. Second, we look at the growing literature on holiday homes and examine how demand for this type of accommodation in tourism destinations can affect the functioning of local housing markets. In this context, we examine issues of housing affordability in tourism destinations, the role of the supply side, but also the policy challenges and responses, suggested in the relevant literature.

Linked-trip effects of ‘town-centre-first' era foodstore development: An assessment using difference-in-differences

High levels of out-of-centre foodstore developments in the 1980s and early 1990s significantly altered the commercial landscape of the UK, and were widely seen as threatening the vitality and viability of small and medium-sized centres. The progressive tightening of retail planning regulation in the decade that followed, and retailer adaptation to that tightening, resulted in the development of more flexible foodstore formats suited to in-centre or edge-of-centre sites, which worked ‘with the grain’ of the ‘town centre first’ approach to retail planning policy. Since then academic research has started to suggest a more positive role for such developments than hitherto, and to indicate that they can play an important role in anchoring small centres. The key mechanism underlining this potential positive role is that of linked trips, whereby the spatial externality generated by a foodstore development is transmitted to the existing retail structure of the centre in which development has occurred. Even though UK planning policy has consistently viewed the role of linked shopping trips as critical to town centre vitality, available evidence on this key issue remains remarkably scarce and dated in terms of the planning regulation context from which it was generated. This paper aims to fill that gap. We make use of a large and unique database on consumer shopping behaviour collected over the period August 2007–November 2009 in selected UK centres, and employ the difference-in-differences method to obtain insight into the hypothesised uplift in linked trip propensity which can be attributed to a foodstore development. Our results indicate that the development of new-generation foodstores in in-centre and edge-of-centre locations does indeed increase the propensity of shoppers to link their trips between foodstores and town centre shops/services. Controlling for shoppers’ individual characteristics, that increase is shown to be over seven percentage points. The exact numerical value is likely to be sample specific, and its typical range will only be established by replication. However, the importance of the finding is that using sophisticated but appropriate statistical methodology and a large sample of data from a transparently designed and rigorously conducted study, the development of ‘new-generation’ town-centre first foodstores is clearly associated with increased linked trip propensities. To our knowledge, this is the first time unambiguous evidence of the existence of this hypothesised ‘town centre first era’ linked-trip effect has been demonstrated.