London leavers who kept the salary. About half of households rent. Just over half of working-age adults hold a degree. The median age is forty-one. Not students, not pensioners, the working-age bit in the middle who quietly got on with owning or renting a Regency flat.
Take tenure first. Just over half of households own the home they live in, either outright or with a mortgage. Just over a third rent privately. About one in ten rent from a social landlord. Which is a genuinely mixed-tenure district by British standards, and one where the arithmetic of homeownership is closer to fifty-fifty than in most southern coastal cities. The Victorian flats do most of the renting. The Victorian villas do most of the owning. The map already did the sorting before the estate agents had to invent a story about it.
The age profile reads mid-career. The median resident is forty-one. About a third of the population sit in the twenty-five-to-forty-four bracket, which is the biggest single working-age band. Under-eighteens are a quieter share than in a suburban town, and pensioners a quieter share than in an actual seaside town. The typical Hove household is a working adult in their thirties or forties, buying, renting, or refinancing, with an opinion about oat milk that they hold with some seriousness.
Median household income lands close to £58,000, which is comfortably above the national median without being anywhere near the London-professional band. Two salaries in the mid-career column, or one salary in the senior column, or a combination that assumes both partners work. It is enough to service a mortgage on a flat, tight for a mortgage on a semi, and not really enough for the sort of house that has a driveway in front. The single-income buyer is a rare sighting on the streets nearest the seafront.
On household make-up: just over a third of households are single-person, which is a higher share than the national average and consistent with a district that runs on Victorian one-bed flats. About one in eight households are single pensioners. About one in six are couples with children. Under one in ten are lone parents. The rest are couples without children, house-shares, and the various arrangements that do not fit neatly into a tick-box. The story the mix tells is that Hove is not primarily a family district, even though the schools do fine. It is primarily a district of adults in various configurations who wanted a seafront and could pay for one.
Three and a half out of five on the neighbourhood-character scorecard. Not a family district. Not a student district. Not a retirement district. Mostly working-age adults with degrees and mortgages, in the specific configuration that pays for a Victorian coastal terrace and considers it money well spent.