like actually tho
Insulae housed most of the urban citizen population of ancient Rome's massive population ranging from 800,000 to 1 million inhabitants in the early imperial period.[4] Residents of an insula included ordinary people of lower- or middle-class status (the plebeians) and all but the wealthiest from the upper-middle class (the equites).
The traditional elite and the very wealthy lived in a domus, a large single-family residence, but the two kinds of housing were intermingled in the city and not segregated into separate neighborhoods.[5] The ground-level floor of the insula was used for tabernae, shops and businesses, with living spaces above. Like modern apartment buildings, an insula might have a name, usually referring to the owner of the building.[6] The owners of these buildings were typically wealthy Romans and even those in the Senate.[7] It was also possible for an insula to be owned by several people, such as Cicero, who owned a one-eighth share of an insula and presumably took in one-eighth of its revenue.[8] The inhabitants of the insula paid rent to secure their accommodation.
Strabo notes that insulae, like domus, had running water and sanitation, but this type of housing was sometimes constructed at minimal expense for speculative purposes, resulting in insulae of poor construction. They were built in timber, brick, and later Roman concrete, and were prone to fire and collapse, as described by Juvenal, the Roman satirist. Among his many business interests, Marcus Licinius Crassus speculated in real estate and owned numerous insulae in the city. When one collapsed from poor construction, Cicero purportedly stated that he was happy that he could charge higher rents for a new building than the collapsed one.
