Who Owns East Boston?

A look at the demographics of East Boston landlords and tenants.



We looked at the available last names of all property owners in East Boston.
Of the 9,500 properties, we found 5,400 unique owner names.
Then we compared the number of landlords living in a building they own to those living elsewhere.

Owner–Occupied Non-resident Landlord
3.466 2,182

We asked the question: do the ethnic demographics of Owner-Occupants and Non-resident Landlords in East Boston reflect those of residents?



According to the most recent American Community Survey
58% of East Boston residents are Hispanic/Latino.



Ethnicity %
Hispanic/Latino 58
White Only 32
Asian 3
Black 3
Other 4

There is no census data for East Boston owners
so we explored the last names of owners.

More specifically, we asked: Where are the last names of owners most prevalent around the world?



For each last name we looked at the Top 10
countries around the world where it is most often found.
For example, outside the US the last name “Lilly” is most prevalent in England.

This chart contains the entire Lilly Top 10.

Lilly
England
Canada
Algeria
India
Mexico
South Africa
Germany
Australia
Kenya
New Zealand

According to our research, the countries that appear most often in the Top 10 of East Boston Owner–Occupied property owners are...

Owner-Occupied
Canada
Argentina
Australia
England
Brazil
Italy
Mexico
Germany
Spain
Colombia

Red counties are Owner-Occupied Top 10

Map goes here

How does this compare with Landlords?

Red counties are Owner–Occupied Top 10

Map goes here
Owner–Occupied Non-resident Landlord
Canada Canada
Argentina England
Australia Australia
England Brazil
Brazil France
Italy Argentina
Mexico Italy
Germany Germany
Spain South Africa
Colombia Mexico

Orange counties are Non-resident Landlord Top 10

Map goes here


Our Methodology...

We captured the owners names of all 8,388 properties in zip code of 20128 for East Boston from AnalyzeBoston. We used 2017 data. We defined an Owner-Occupant as a property listed as taking the residential exemption, of which there were 3,466. This left 4,922 properties remaining. Of these, many owners had multiple properties, and therefore, we consolidated these properties and only used one last name per group of properties. Furthermore, we removed all properties owned by a company for which the company name did not start with a last name. For example, if a property was owned by "123 Street LLC", it was removed; but if it was owned by "Smith Family LLC" it was included using the last name of "Smith." After removing duplicates and businesses we were left with 2,182 last names of owners who did not take the residential exemption. These owners we called Landlords. Once we had all the last names, we searched the prevalence of the last name around the world by searching the name using forebear.io . This gave us every country in which the name exists with the corresponding number of incidents of that name in each country (for example, there might be 45,878 incidents of the last name of "Robinson" in England). Some names existed in only one country. Some names existed in over 200 countries. We collected the Top 10 countries in which each name exists. We then tallied the total number of times a country existed in the Top 10 of each name. Using this tally gave us our final numbers of prevalence around the world.



Visualizing Eastie is a project of the Information Design and Visualization program at Northeastern University. © 2018