Show HN: A website that heatmaps your city based on your housing preferences
28 comments
·February 7, 2025uoflcards22
You should see if you could make this an extension to overlay on Zillow
aantix
I genuinely wish there was a map where you could see how many kids and their age groups are in a given neighborhood.
Our current house is great, but there aren't many kids in the neighborhood.
I understand this is sensitive information, so it probably doesn't exist.
But choosing a neighborhood with other families that are in a similar life experience is kind of hard..
Especially considering it seems that kids play outside much less, so that's less of a signal.
venusenvy47
For younger age groups, you could search for how many elementary schools are in the region. Our town has a lot of these schools, because people don't want to be sending their young children far away. Generally it's not until high school age where the students might have to travel farther from home to school.
silisili
In my experience, age of homes in the neighborhood approximately equals age of kids in the neighborhood, +- a few years. And that makes sense if you think of who is typically buying houses en masse as a group - new families. Now, I don't live somewhere like SF of NY where people cycle in and out, more cities of various sizes in the midwest and south.
My first house was built in the 40's. A few original owners existed, along with second owners. I noticed I guess people don't tend to move often. There were hardly any kids in the neighborhood.
Next house was built in 2009(this would have been 2018ish), and the neighborhood was packed full of kids.
Next house was built in the 80s. A lot of original owners, again, few kids.
Next house was built in 2012, this would have been 2021 - tons of kids
Next house built in mid 90s. This was 2022. Almost everyone in the neighborhood was the original owner, very few kids.
So, if my theory holds, if you want to find a neighborhood with a lot of kids, buy a midrange house in a ~5 year old neighborhood.
(and yes, I realize I've moved a lot).
diggan
> I genuinely wish there was a map where you could see how many kids and their age groups are in a given neighborhood.
Maybe your local city/state/county/country government has a "Open Data" portal where they publish stuff like that? Barcelona for example has a pretty extensive Open Data collection (https://opendata-ajuntament.barcelona.cat/en) where you'd be able to find data like that (probably not ready made graphs/maps though), and probably also averaged data about how many people live in the households of a neighborhood, so you could extrapolate for families, etc.
timita
If you are based in the UK, there is https://xploria.co.uk. Click/tap on any location on the map and you get a lot of information about the place, inclusive of generations, what percentage of families, singles, etc, schools within travel timw, and so on. Disclosure: I built this web app.
robhh
That's exactly what I'm also looking for. I've been looking for a house in both Canada and the U.S. and for Canada there are some house search websites that show demographic census data for each neighborhood. For the U.S. I haven't seen anything comparable. I don't even know if this type of demographic data at the necessary granularity would be available publicly?
robhh
There is another website that I've been using that provides similar functionality in terms of the heatmap: http://close.city
What I like about this one is that it can show travel times from a specific address. What would be even more useful is if it could show mixed-mode transportation times.
WarOnPrivacy
The available housing preferences may need to be reflected in the title.
My desired heatmap is for 5+ beds/3+ baths at [price range]. It's okay this isn't that - but the Housing Preferences descriptor indicates it might be.
nonethewiser
I had the same impression. Like Price per Acre.
I didnt expect there to only be 1 type of constraint (travel time to a given location).
I think emphasizing its purely based on distance would be clearer.
madcaptenor
I put my wife's work location and my own in it and it correctly showed me that where we actually live would be a good location. When we moved to our house she worked at a different place, but I can see how this would be useful.
The "only show best matches" criterion is a little bit too aggressive in this case, though - it basically says "have you tried living in the middle of the highway"?
vindex10
Also matched my place perfectly. With my work, leisure and commute requirements! Funny, I feel my requirements overfit on my habits - the area where I live is was the only highlighted area with no alternative sweet spots.
Terr_
I've always liked the idea of combining distance criteria, especially when something is good for public transit to work, but not good in terms of walkability to anything I care about. (Some people walk for fun, I always seem to need an errand.)
I recall that Walkscore used to have something like this, and then it went away, and then it showed up on some other housing site... I was always surprised the type of feature didn't get more popular.
In terms of new features, there is a tricky problem of how to define things like "near a grocery store, the large kind, not that one tiny mini-mart". This brings in several overlapping challenges: How to get business locations and categorize them, how to allow the user to tweak that categorization or result, and how to efficiently turn a union of those the set of valid destinations into a combined region.
WiggleGuy
The "grocery store" problem is something I've been thinking about for a while, since it has two problems:
- There are tons of grocery stores (efficiency of processing all of those)
- Not all grocery stores are the same (supermarkets vs pricey luxury stores vs bodegas)
I've been thinking of mass processing one-time then allowing the user to super-impose pre-made heatmaps onto thier existing heatmap.
escapecharacter
What if I’m a Kaiju, and I want to disrupt the most electrical cables juice up? What path of destruction is best for me?
silisili
I love the idea, but the data seems a bit off. I tested it in my little city, where I'm < 14 minutes by car from the grocery. It's actually a little quicker, but I'm going by Google Maps estimates.
Setting a criteria of 15 mins by car, I'm far out in the gray. I'd have to drive a couple miles to even get in the red. It's only 6 miles away!
cortesoft
> It's only 6 miles away!
Six miles is like a 30 minute drive when I am
silisili
Been there, done that, hopefully not again :).
I was hoping 'little city' would have indicated, but I should have specified, there is never enough traffic here to move the estimates much. Speed limit is 35ish the whole way.
WiggleGuy
Yeah, different geo analysis providers have different weightings for travel time (turns, street density, etc). It can sometimes lead to inconsistencies like this, especially if they don't use GPS and proprietary data to correct things...
tsigo
I'm not in the market for a new home right now but I would absolutely use this in a future search. As it is now, it helped me confirm that my house is in a great location for everything I do regularly.
It did seem to think that the closest "Bar" to me was a 19 minute drive, when in reality there are several within a 2 minute walk, however.
shekhar101
This is really cool (and timely for me). Lovely work with the UX. No accounts, no nonsense. Kudos.
duckapricottuba
Would be nice to use conditions. Like, if there are multiple libraries in a city and I would like to evaluate being 15 minutes from any of them, have a condition able to be set -
15 minutes from: Library A OR Library B OR Library C
WiggleGuy
That actually is possible
Heatmaps are split into criteria, and each of those criteria can contain multiple places.
The criteria are OR clauses between any of the places, and the heatmap is an AND clause over all the criteria
So to do what you'd like, you'd place the libraries in the same criteria
jeffbee
This is really neat. It would be cool if you exposed some parameters like walking speed. This shows that a trip I make daily in ~12 minutes is just barely within the 30 minute walking shell from my house. Also if you want to waste an insane amount of time and effort, you could integrate this with a digital elevation model to yield better biking times.
For the past few months, I've been working on a website that answers two different questions:
- Where in my city have the best travel times to all the things and people I care about?
- Given a listing, how far is it from all the things and people I care about?
Personally this was fueled by my own frustrations when I was apartment hunting in NYC. I was frustrating to have to juggle so many Google Maps tabs when I was evaluating a listing, and it was also annoying to not have full confidence that I was even searching in the right places.
I wanted to be close to work, a Trader Joe's, and a major park. Given that public transportation networks can sometimes make close things hard to get to and far things easy to get to, it's not always obvious whether a neighborhood actually even fits my criteria or not!
The overarching goal of theretowhere.com is to allow you to make more informed moving decisions while also making things more convenient than they are today.
https://ibb.co/pBsX2HjN
It can generate detailed travel time breakdowns for individual listings and addresses, making it easier to determine whether a listing is worth applying for without juggling Google Maps tabs. This is great for questions like “How far is this apartment from my friends, work and dancing gyms?”
https://ibb.co/mVBjwPrJ
It also has the powerful ability to heatmap a city based on which parts of it are close or not to the people and places you care about. This is great for questions like “Where in the city would I be reasonably close to work, friends and a woodworking studio?”
https://ibb.co/vCynPSRK
You can add these heatmaps to sites like Zillow and Streeteasy to make things super convenient (this was very fun to make).
The main thing that's on my mind is whether this is useful or not. Like, is this something you would actually use? I also have other ideas I'd like to eventually intergrate into this (crime heatmaps, noise heatmaps, etc)