Exactly one year ago, on May 18, 2022, the National Institute of Statistics and Censuses (INDEC) conducted the national census. As last January, this Thursday a new cut of provisional data was disseminated, in what Marco Lavagna defined – before a small group of journalists – as a deliberate interest in disseminating, in installments, focused analytical reports, with few variables, instead of the typical "large census book", much more complex to read, he suggested. Of the 12 aspects addressed in this report focused on the housing conditions of the more than 17 million homes in the country, the drop in the number of houses with at least one owner is surprising, a figure that fell 10 percentage points in the last 20 years.
Without going into (for now) other worrying data of the report, such as that there are many more homes with at least one cell phone connected to the internet than those, a) with drinking water, b) with electricity or mains gas for cooking and c) with connection to the sewage network, getting into the arduous chapter of the chronic difficulties to be a homeowner in Argentina requires, First, remember the basic terminology that allows us to understand the census.
"Dwelling", in this case, refers to the material structure of a house or apartment. Instead, "household" is the group that shares a household economy. Thus, in a dwelling there can be one, two or more households.
What evaluates the variable "owners" is whether at least one person in the household owns the home in question. The result is that only 65.5% of the country's homes are inhabited by at least one owner, a figure that in itself offers few nuances, but that becomes relevant when looking at history.
And, in 2010, the proportion of homes with owners living there amounted to 72.9%. While in 2001 it had been 74.9%. There is a notable drop of almost ten percentage points in two decades, as reflected in the census conducted last year.
The real estate boom
Is any of this explained by the notable increase in the number of homes built in recent years? In 2001, there were 12,041,584 private (non-collective) households. A decade later, in 2010, they had risen to 13,812,125, a growth of 14%.
But in 2022, the jump was abysmal: they went to 17,780,210, almost 29% above, something that, obviously, did not happen proportionally with the national population, which grew, but only 18% intercensally.
As always happens with the great statistical sweeps, the interesting thing is to look at each provincial reality. And in this case it is the city of Buenos Aires summons, since barely more than half (52.9%) of the homes are inhabited by "owners".
This reality changes significantly in the province of Buenos Aires, where 67.3% of homes have owners, the census surveyed.
News in development
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