Pint of Science: Curious About the Housing Crisis?

As a follow-on to my earlier piece on Hex-Binning Land Registry Data, here’s a talk I gave on the housing crisis as part of the Pint of Science Festival a couple of weeks back.

And, credit where credit is due: this builds on an idea I got from Mark Ruddy at UCL, who wanted to look at pricing change in London and used a hex-binning approach to mitigate the problem of very small postcodes.

Median price as multiple of regional income (full version is 20MB)
Median price as multiple of regional income (full version is 20MB)

What I’ve done here is to scale that process up to all of England & Wales (Scotland, sadly, does not appear to have this type of transaction data). The regional maps included in this talk are each coloured according to regional gross median income, which I obtained as part of a FOI request (2014-3226, since you ask).

If you want to generate the same bins, then you’ll need the MMQGIS plug-in to generate a grid with the following properties: Left X=0; Bottom Y=0; Width=663,000; Height=1,230,000; H Spacing=750. That should give you a fairly nice layout and it’s quite handy that OSGB is measured from 0,0 so you don’t have to try to figure this all out in Lat/Long.

Anyway, here’s the talk: