Census data: 41 thousand families with more than 4 members live in apartments less than 40 square meters

Albania has invested more than any other country in the Region in building housing, but still a significant part of families live in miserable conditions.

Detailed 2023 Census data that was recently released for counties shows that across the country. 40.7 thousand apartments are under 40 square meters, in which more than four people live.

On the other hand, about 32.9% of the total dwellings, or 356 thousand, were uninhabited at the time the census was conducted.

The data show that Tirana and Elbasan have the highest number of families with more than 4 people living on an area of ??less than 40 square meters. In Tirana there are over 8 thousand families living in these conditions and in Elbasan over 5 thousand families.

Furthermore, Berati, Korça and Fieri each have more than 4 thousand families with more than 4 members living in narrow spaces of less than 40 square meters.

In contrast, Gjirokastra, Kukësi and Lezha have a lower number of families with more members living in narrow spaces due to the fact that they have a smaller population.

Families with more members living in tight spaces are concentrated in large urban areas, such as Tirana and its surrounding counties, where the cost of living and housing prices are higher.

The 2023 census counted 1,082,529 ordinary dwellings. Individual houses represented 47.0 percent of these dwellings, while 39.9 percent of them are buildings.

A small category of dwellings are semi-detached dwellings (8.1%) and terraced houses (5.0%).

From the total number of ordinary dwellings, at the time of the census, 726,325 (67.1 percent) were inhabited dwellings, estimating 32.9 percent uninhabited ordinary dwellings.

The rate of unoccupied ordinary dwellings ranged from 24.3 per cent for semi-detached dwellings to 39.4 per cent for tenement dwellings.

For ordinary inhabited dwellings, the surface area used was one of the collected information which will serve to analyze "dwelling overcrowding".

Almost half of these dwellings (47.1 percent) had a used area of ??40-69 m2 and about a quarter (23.7 percent) had a useful space of 70-99 m2.

Censi estimated that 86.4 percent of ordinary inhabited dwellings had running water in the dwelling or in the building. Almost all ordinary inhabited dwellings (96.2 percent) had a toilet inside the dwelling or inside the building./Monitor