Digging deeper in the census data part 6: Building Usage

Hello and welcome to Open Citizen Data Science!

Today we will explore building usage by residents, plus occupation and ownership rates.

Let's do a recap of the fields in this particular section:

- Abitazioni occupate da almeno una persona residente
- Abitazioni vuote e abitazioni occupate solo da persone non residenti
- Altri tipi di alloggio occupati
- Abitazioni vuote
- Abitazioni occupate solo da persone non residenti
- Superficie delle abitazioni occupate da almeno una persona residente
- Famiglie in alloggi in affitto
- Famiglie in alloggi di proprietà
- Famiglie che occupano l'alloggio ad altro titolo

The first thing to check that could make a difference is how many habitative units are used by residents compared to the total:

Typical urban outskirts

Full residency is not a rare phenomenon, about 14,5% of inhabitated areas have a 100% residency rate, which is consistent with the traditional high ownership rate in Italy.

What about the opposite?

This looks suspicious

1089 residents in an area without habitative units looks like an anomaly, let's see what could be causing it:

Just like in our previous posts, be wary of religious institutions nearby

Looks like we need to do some filtering, let's start by filtering out areas without a building in it:

Yet another religious institution

943 people in an area without residential buildings. Definitely another anomaly, let's filter that out:

An elderly home

386 people, 1 residential building but no habitative units. Looks like we need to filter this out as well:

A church

 6650 people, 4 units, only 3 of which are used. Let's bring back the people per unit <12= filter:

Industrial area in urban outskirts

This looks more plausible and probably indicates an area temporarily occupied by workers in local commercial and industrial activities, not exactly a great commercial target.

Home ownership is another good indicator, let's see the top area:

Big apartment complex on city outskirts

Like we stated before, Italians have an high preference for home ownership and city outskirts are usually a reasonably affordable way to obtain that and around 9,5% of our filtered areas have full ownership.

What about the opposite?

An army base

The top of the list is full of similar places so let's bring back the filter of having at least one habitative units with residents:

Likely council houses

Very low ownership usually means special cases but in this case it's not an anomaly. With almost 100% residents living there, this combination usually means some form of subsidized housing like council houses.

Lastly, it could be interesting to see if habitative unit size yelds useful information.

Let's start with the largest:

Pretty fancy and in an urban area

Pretty big and with very few people inside, this is an extreme case but not an anomaly although we would have discarded this area in other posts as it's below 10 people.

Going to the opposite extreme, let's see the smallest:

Not the nicest area if you like quiet

 Assuming the census area refers to square meters, the aparments here average at 28, while the house before was just shy of 1000. Also extreme but definitely not an anomaly with 44 residents.

Let's see a distribution of areas:

At around 100 square meters in average, looks like Italians prefer relatively large apartments.

This concludes our post, stay tuned for our next article on family size!