Show HN: A website that heatmaps your city based on your housing preferences
103 comments
·February 7, 2025drooby
This is cool but I don't think it fits my use case..
Seems like I have to pick criteria that have exact venues.. I want to pick abstract things like "walking distance from grocery", "biking distance from climbing gym" "1 hour drive to national park"
WiggleGuy
Hello!
To echo what loxias said, it is possible to make queries like this on the heatmap. You can use the "Search Nearby places" button - this takes in more general queries (like cafe, gym, walmart, etc) and gives you back a bunch of venues that fit that search.
duskwuff
This doesn't seem to work very well. Searching for "grocery store" netted me a set of 22 locations spread across the entire country.
WiggleGuy
Ah, you probably tried to search before the website got your location (so it couldn't bias your search).
I'll make this an impossible state, thanks for bringing this up.
blehn
I don't really understand what the search nearby places button is doing. I think the solution would be to allow some sort of OR operator (which seems straightforward), or conditions the act on generic queries (which seems more difficult). For example say you live in NYC and want some nice green space near you. Choosing a single park is too narrow and choosing all parks is too broad. So you should be able to say e.g. "Central Park OR Prospect Park OR Brooklyn Bridge Park OR Fort Greene Park", or you should be able to say "Park, > 10 acres, 4+ star google rating, has tennis court, has bike path"... the point is that not all parks, grocery stores, coffee shops, etc are equal; I need to be able to qualify them somehow.
WiggleGuy
I missed this comment!
> Central Park OR Prospect Park OR Brooklyn Bridge Park OR Fort Greene Park
You can do this, actually. I kinda explain that here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42976053
The heatmap supports both AND and OR clauses
The second one (acrage, stars, etc) is harder, you're right.
The "Search nearby places" is really meant to be a convenience feature to fill your OR clauses. It works better for certain types of things. Like, sure, all parks is too broad because not all parks are equal. But use it for something like all Targets (the shopping chain) or something, and its more useful, since those are, more or less, all equal.
I'm still thinking of other convenience features for places that have more nuance, like parks.
ghostpepper
You might prefer a more general walkability map, eg. https://www.walkscore.com
loxias
I found it was surprisingly easy to "populate with every instance of a given type". I've made a few maps based on grocery and transit where I did it by adding all >100 stores & stops.
ajross
"Total count of non-national-chain restaurants within a 1km walk" pretty much determines my criterion. Everything else is a once a week thing or less. The homes themselves are just a bunch of rooms, and I'm flexible. Quality of life is defined by my stomach.
wilted-iris
Same, and I add one even more amorphous criteria, 'not directly next to noise pollution like an airport or highways.'
null
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.
aaroninsf
Me too. I poked at the UX for a good few minutes trying to find out how to change the TYPE of constraint lol
ignormies
I currently commute by train _and_ bike, but this only lets me filter by one or another, unfortunately.
This seems to be a common problem with navigation systems in general. It's easy to get walking+transit directions, but nigh impossible to get bike+transit, even though all the buses and trains near me let me bring a bike onboard.
ajb
Citymapper will do it. Haven't personally tried the results
ignormies
Yeah the "mixed" navigation option sometimes provides it, but with many caveats:
- it never suggests bike+bus, only bike+train
- it will only ever try to put the biking on one end of the train ride, never both. I guess it assumes I'd be parking the bike at the station, not bringing it on board
- you can't actually "start" the navigation for some reason. It will just show the route overview
ajb
I have seen it schedule the bike at both ends. But it does seem like it assumes the bike is an 'option' like all the other forms of transport, which makes sense for bikes hired by the minute, but not if you're taking your own with you - you need all segments to be bike-friendly.
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 was the only highlighted area with no alternative sweet spots.
KolmogorovComp
For the nerds, the exact name for these heatmaps is Isochrone maps [0].
losvedir
This is incredible! I've been looking at new houses for a while now, trying to balance living next to a park, walking distance to elementary school and a grocery store, and within a driving distance to my wife's work. I'm having a blast playing around with it right now and scoping out the potential neighborhoods that would be best.
One feature request: when you do "Search Nearby" (e.g. I did "elementary school") it found a _lot_ of schools, like 50 or more, well out side the city I was interested in. But short of adding them all and going through one by one and deleting them, is there a way to add just the matches in the city I put in the top-right corner? Maybe adjust the search radius or something? Or in the search results preview it gives you, a button to just select the few you want to add.
edit: oh, and another feature request. I'd love to accordion/collapse my criteria. Scrolling past my 40 parks to edit the bottom criterion is tedious.
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...
DonHopkins
TomTom maps (and probably others, I just worked for TomTom so know how theirs work) combine both real time traffic information, and road speed estimates based on data from users uploading their driving traces (with start and end locations removed to anonymize them), so it has a table of the average driving speed for all roads, on a per-hour and weekday/weekend basis, plus any real time traffic information it has, which it uses for route calculation and time estimation.
bagels
I want to live where I can walk to a grocery store, there is little traffic, crime and detritus, balancing affordability.
This doesn't cover any of that.
superconduct123
Why even comment then?
OP explained up front what the tool does
Its like walking by a poster advertising guitar lessons and exclaiming out loud "I don't want guitar lessons!"
bagels
Because I was induced to click by the title of the post:
"Show HN: A website that heatmaps your city based on your housing preferences"
I'm providing feedback that what is promised is not delivered. Maybe it's the op's preferences, but it's not my preferences.
It's more like a poster offering guitar lessons, and the person will only tell you that a guitar has five strings.
IncreasePosts
I thought about using Google maps street view photos for something like that, get all the photos for a city, and then classify how much trash is visible, and also calculate how many people there are and what they're doing.
My idea, at least from living in New York, is that if there are a medium amount of people walking around, and not that many people just sitting there or leaning against a building, and there isn't a ton of trash visible, then it is probably a pretty good neighborhood.
If there is nobody, or a ton of people, or if the people aren't mobile, or if there's a lot of trash, then it is probably not a neighborhood that I would like.
You could probably also use business types for that. Like, I would not want to live in a neighborhood that has a ton of pawn shops or churches in it.
cvwright
Unfortunately if you built this, half of the world would publicly condemn you as a terrible horrible person.
anigbrowl
I wanted to do this with a city I don't currently live in, but every time I did searches on specific locations it went for the nearest (bad) match to my current geographic location. It'd be nice to generalize it.
I do like that you used OSM rather than Google maps.
WiggleGuy
This is possible!
I should probably make the UX better. When you're on the heatmap page (or the distance matrix page), look at the top right of the screen. It shows you where it's basing its searches on, and you can override that bias with any location you like.
You only need to update it once per session - all pages and components will be updated
the_real_cher
On the UX it would be helpful to add an option to delete all places.
It added 50 grocery stores with a "nearby places" search and inhad to refresh the page to start a new search instead of spending time clicking those X's.
kridsdale1
His place finder is Google Maps. I know the guy that wrote it.
davideg
This is really cool! Well done. Like others, I'd love to specify generic things like distance to a "grocery store" or "gym" as part of my initial criteria. I see that I can add a long list of possible places that meet a search, so maybe I just want the UI to hide the details from me and add all those possible places for me.
I personally found the additional criteria being added to the top to be counter intuitive and I inadvertently deleted locations thinking it was the newest criterion, but it was actually my earlier ones. I think I've been trained to look/scroll to the bottom for the added element (e.g. like when adding additional Google Maps locations)
I would also love an option to mix transportation modes. For example, public transportation and biking.
Anyway, thank you for building this!
michaelmior
Very cool! This is nice when considering moving to a new area to narrow down neighborhoods that could work. One thing that I think could be useful is to also add criteria for things I want to be far from. Some people don't like living near airports for example.
DonHopkins
Tom Carden made the "mySociety Travel Time and House Price Maps" in 2007:
https://www.tom-carden.co.uk/2008/01/24/mysociety-maps
>O'Reilly Radar has the scoop on the most recent thing I've finished working on at Stamen. Interactive travel time and house price maps for London. Go play, and read what mySociety have to say, including the ones for BBC TV Centre and the Olympic Stadium site. Then come back and read this full post if you want the background info...
O'Reilly Radar Article:
https://web.archive.org/web/20080208084133/http://radar.orei...
mySocieties: More travel-time maps and their uses
https://www.mysociety.org/2007/03/05/more-travel-time-maps-a...
This project became Mapumental (Mapumental was a mySociety project to plot journeys by time, not distance.):
Unfortunately the live site was closed down, but the pages describe a lot of great inspirational ideas!
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)