HOUSING as a FACTOR in SOCIAL EXCLUSION: VENICE Case Study

Collecting a complete set of data on housing in Venice will give future researchers and residents an accurate data set to compare past and future trends. This is important, as many researchers are investigating if and how changes in housing stock and pricing has played into the recent depopulation of the city. For this project, we expanded on a 2021 WPI research project that began to explore this question (Bolduc, Redgate, Sesma, Walsh, 2021). We consulted as many primary resources as possible–government housing and tax records, real estate websites, listings of tourist rental, and publications from credited authors. We used this data to answer the following questions: What are the types of housing in the historic city? How much stock is there for each type? How available and affordable is housing in Venice for its Venetian residents? We developed an online data repository to centralize our data and key trends so that researchers--including those working alongside the SmartDest European Union project (2020)--can better inform their understanding of the ways residents in tourist-centric cities may experience social exclusion.