Juan Convers

This morning I read in the news that the “Average 30-year mortgage rate falls for a fifth straight week” (3.72%). I checked whether the data was available to verify this headline. Fortunately, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis offers this data set on their website. It's called MORTGAGE30US, and the data goes back to 1971.

Looking at the data, it’s true that the 30-year mortgage rate has been falling over the last couple of weeks. However, it's not the lowest point on the graph. In fact, last year around the same time, it was even lower (3.59%):

I wanted to wrap up this series of posts I have been writing about the people living in Berlin, using data provided by the Statistical Office of Berlin-Brandenburg, with a final post about EU foreign citizens living in the city.

A couple of days ago I was discussing how Poland, Italy and Bulgaria were the EU countries with the highest number of expats living in Berlin, but the data also contains a very interesting breakdown per district (Bezirk).

I put the totals in a density map:

I also used the specific countries data to create a matrix heatmap using the tutorial on how to create a heatmap with jQuery and Tables. See the resulting table below:

There are a couple of interesting conclusions from the data: Polish are definitely the highest minority from the EU countries and this can be observed in every district. Mitte is definitely the most popular district for most of the EU citizens and finally Marzahn-Hellersdorf is the least popular overall.

Almost the same picture taken near Rosenthalerplatz in two different seasons in Berlin.

Following my post yesterday, I kept digging into the data published by the Statistical Office of Berlin-Brandenburg. I wanted to discover where most of the "Foreign" Europeans living in Berlin come from. Since the European Union agreement allows the free movement of people across member states, I was expecting that the number 1 slot would be taken by a country within the EU borders. Actually, it’s Turkey that has the most immigrants living in Berlin, with almost 100k people:

Now the second and third positions are from countries in the European Union: Poland and Italy. This is followed by one of the newcomers in the union: Bulgaria.

The Statistical Office of Berlin-Brandenburg publishes some very interesting reports including: Einwohnerinnen und Einwohner im Land Berlin (Residents in the State of Berlin, 31 December 2014). One of the remarkable sections of this document is about the country of origin of the foreign residents living in Berlin. It offers a breakdown by continents, regions, and countries, so I was curious about the top countries in South America:

I'm not surprised to discover Brazil (3948 people) is the top #1 on the list, but I wasn't expecting that Colombia (1527) was going to be the second one in that region. Interesting.

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