If you’re a nosey neighbour or an expat exploring a possible new home, a new data source reveals all about people and housing in any European neighbourhood.
The Census Hub has gone live online uniting the census information of each of the 28 European Union nation states plus the four member states of the European Free Trade Association – Iceland, Norway, Liechtenstein and Switzerland.
The data available covers almost 125,000 local authority areas across the European Union collected during 2011.
The hub allows anyone to easily answer questions and compare information with a simple online search through the Europa information portal.
To show how the information from the database can be utilised, the EU has released some guide tables and answers to popular queries.
Local information
For example property investors can discover at a national, regional and local level how many tenants rent their homes.
The query how many people aged over 85 years old do live in their own home shows a third of the elderly in Luxembourg do not – the highest level in the EU.
Other high scorers were Malta (29.7%), Ireland (22.6%), the Netherlands (22.4%), Belgium (21.0%) and France (20.8%).
However most live in their own homes in Romania (98.7%), Bulgaria (98.3%), Poland (97.4%), Lithuania (97.0%), Latvia (96.0%) and Greece (95.8%).
Other queries can disclose how many expats live in a neighbourhood, how many people over 50 years old live in an area and how many people are in work.
Flexible tool
Some of the facts extracted from the data include:
- The over 85s make up 4% of the population in Salamanca, Spain.
- Single people comprise more than half of households in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
- That there were 1,661 families of six or more people live in Malmo, Sweden
- Two-thirds of the families in Hamburg, Germany, are married couples
- Single fathers make up 5% all families in Antwerp, Belgium
- Two-thirds of homes in St Tropez, on the Cote d’Azur, France, are holiday homes or second homes
- More than 90% of all homes in Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, are flats or shared houses
“The Census Hob gives anyone a new and flexible way to query and interpret population and housing data from across Europe,” said an EU spokesman.
“For the first time, anyone can discover the information they need to know
“Applications include demographic information for businesses or finding out about a neighbourhood for expats.”
