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Show HN: A website that heatmaps your city based on your housing preferences

by WiggleGuy on 2/7/25, 6:23 PM with 99 comments

• by drooby on 2/7/25, 8:17 PM

  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"

• by WarOnPrivacy on 2/7/25, 6:45 PM

  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.

• by ignormies on 2/8/25, 2:19 AM

  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.

• by madcaptenor on 2/7/25, 6:54 PM

  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"?

• by KolmogorovComp on 2/8/25, 1:50 PM

  For the nerds, the exact name for these heatmaps is Isochrone maps [0].

  0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isochrone_map

• by losvedir on 2/8/25, 3:35 AM

  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.

• by silisili on 2/7/25, 6:46 PM

  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!

• by bagels on 2/7/25, 10:33 PM

  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.

• by anigbrowl on 2/7/25, 10:01 PM

  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.

• by davideg on 2/8/25, 12:21 AM

  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!

• by michaelmior on 2/7/25, 8:33 PM

  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.

• by DonHopkins on 2/8/25, 12:29 AM

  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.):

  https://www.mapumental.com

  Unfortunately the live site was closed down, but the pages describe a lot of great inspirational ideas!

• by tsigo on 2/7/25, 6:42 PM

  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.

• by Terr_ on 2/7/25, 6:42 PM

  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.

• by mqus on 2/8/25, 3:47 PM

  As others have mentioned, this kinda misses a "category" filter that is not just a search. I would suggest using the osm database for this (e.g. via overpass). If the data is good (depends on the location), this is better than just a keyword search.

  I also have another issue: If I put the same thing in two different criteria (with different settings), it says the heatmap parameters are invalid.

  My use case is this: I want to have a big station reachable within 30 minutes by public transit and any light rail station within 10 walking minutes. But this big station could fall into both of them, which, to me should then be handled according to the set criteria (maybe just treat it as two different entities entirely, just with the same coordinates?)

• by richardw on 2/7/25, 8:10 PM

  Works for Sydney, well done!

  I previously used Mapnificent to choose a house location, and found that many geographically closer properties were often much further in terms of time. Very useful. I like that it starts off with the map view, maybe do that in terms of “shortest time to a-ha” and to get the user into putting in the work to refine the output?

  https://www.mapnificent.net/sydney/

  I also used this to look at property/area info. Maybe lift some ideas off that. It used to have school ratings, crime etc.

  https://heatmaps.com.au/

  Something that’s a combo of both would be amazing. Good luck!

• by jll29 on 2/8/25, 2:59 PM

  This is an excellent concept - and it may be hard to realize but it would be worth integrating "cost of living" and "languges spoken" concerns, and then to be able to find one's perfect spot on the planet.

• by kanaan on 2/7/25, 10:19 PM

  I've been looking for a tool like this forever. Trying it for my city (Milan, Italy), and it's pretty accurate. Would it ever be possible to specify which type of public transportation to consider (ie: only metro, only bus, ...)?

• by Evidlo on 2/8/25, 11:30 PM

  Some suggestions:

  - option to select individual results of "Search nearby places" or select top N closest result to your location

  - collapsible criteria on the edit/view pages

  - automatically name name untitled heatmaps. I have a ton of "Untitled Heatmaps" in my history which I forgot to name

  - combine the edit/view pages - just have an edit page with a big "Generate" button so you can still edit criteria after heatmap generation

• by dudeofea on 2/7/25, 11:27 PM

  An easy way to make this great tool twice as good: Allow inverted selections.

  I don't want to live near sketchy storefronts, and neither do other people less honest than myself.

• by Medicineguy on 2/7/25, 11:51 PM

  I'm not sure why others have problems, but I love it!

  Once, in a similar situation, I had the thought that "somebody should build that" and never imagined that somebody actually would.

  With your tool, I learned that our home is better located than I thought and that there are many places more downtown that would be worse for me and my wife (bc of highways and good public transport connections).

  I will show this some friends! Thanks!

• by appreciatorBus on 2/7/25, 9:50 PM

  You could take the aggregate of "where people want to live" and then compare that with an estimate of how much floor space the city allows to actually exist. I suspect the ratio would correlate extremely well with prices & rents per sqft of floorspace. In a perfect world this would inform urban planning, though in this world I am less confident.

• by jeffbee on 2/7/25, 6:51 PM

  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.

• by eigenhombre on 2/8/25, 2:16 PM

  Very nice potential in this idea. A few related use cases I would like:

  - population density

  - average cost per square foot

  - distance from river or lake (I live in Chicago)

• by staindk on 2/8/25, 5:33 AM

  This is cool!

  It seems nobody has asked/suggested this so I'll do it - I would love to specify time of day/traffic conditions during which to determine time taken to travel.

  In the next year or two we'll be looking to move and since we work on the southern side of the city, living out to the north wouldn't work due to traffic through the city.

• by jkalsdjf209 on 2/7/25, 10:01 PM

  This is so useful! I have wanted a tool like this for years. Thank you for putting in the work and sharing.

• by tortillasauce on 2/8/25, 8:59 AM

  I like the heat map. Years ago I made something similar with only generic categories like bakery or shop. In the end it wasn't very useful though.

  https://homeground.qwoot.net/

• by shekhar101 on 2/7/25, 6:41 PM

  This is really cool (and timely for me). Lovely work with the UX. No accounts, no nonsense. Kudos.

• by reducesuffering on 2/7/25, 9:15 PM

  I've built a similar app, but for the whole US, where you can input your personal preferences and find the areas in the US that best match based on the data:

  https://exoroad.com

• by Glyptodon on 2/8/25, 12:13 AM

  I tried adding my city's main bike path that goes around the whole city and it seems to only register it as one point instead of a bunch of access points unless I go look up every entrance and manually add it.

• by duckapricottuba on 2/7/25, 6:46 PM

  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

• by asdf6969 on 2/7/25, 9:20 PM

  This would be great if I had enough money for my preferences to matter

• by insane_dreamer on 2/8/25, 6:30 PM

  Is the only criteria travel times? I couldn't find others. Usually there's a mix of criteria that are vital when house hunting?

• by tommoor on 2/8/25, 1:52 PM

  This is fun, living in NYC I need the opposite as well –

  1. At least 2 blocks from a police station

  2. At least 2 blocks from a fire station

  3. At least 1 block from a bar

• by svilen_dobrev on 2/7/25, 10:26 PM

  there was this last year, about isochrone maps:

  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39808215

  not sure how these apply to variants like 10mins by feet vs by 10mins bike vs by bus vs by metro vs by car vs by airplane :)

• by mock-possum on 2/7/25, 6:44 PM

  This is fun - waiting so long for the map to generate is a bit of a drag, but understandable.

• by royal_frog on 2/7/25, 9:57 PM

  I believe these are called contour maps not heatmaps (I might be wrong)

• by uoflcards22 on 2/7/25, 7:39 PM

  You should see if you could make this an extension to overlay on Zillow

• by oa335 on 2/8/25, 3:41 AM

  Great idea! But unfortunately the site was too hard for me to use on mobile (iOS, Brave browser). I was unable to set the location - when I tried to set the location, the screen would randomly zoom in and I couldn’t scroll through the addresses.

• by introspecti on 2/7/25, 10:45 PM

  It only cares about distance by car, walk, etc?

  I would like to have more criterias

• by ev7 on 2/8/25, 12:28 PM

  This doesn't work for Tokyo or Taipei currently :(

• by bnchrch on 2/7/25, 10:55 PM

  Great idea, looking forward to someone implementing it!

• by loxias on 2/7/25, 9:53 PM

  This is really, really cool and thanks for making it!!

  We must think at least somewhat similarly, last few times I was apartment hunting I did the same, though I never polished it up like this (more plugging numbers into a spreadsheet).

  Honestly the biggest thing this does for me is validate that the data APIs must exist for what I'd really want, which is write something to make much larger and more complex "programmatic" maps -- the list of places being generated by a more complex sequence of steps for instance, and the combining function for different criteria including nonlinearities.

  Curious how you're computing the walking distances, I'm guessing this is combining some off the shelf API for it with another for the points of interest? Though it would be badass if you did it from scratch starting from just OSM. ;)

• by escapecharacter on 2/7/25, 7:16 PM

  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?

• by satvikpendem on 2/7/25, 11:03 PM

  See also, Hood Maps [0], a crowdsourced map of annotations of people's opinions on particular areas in a city. It's by Pieter Levels who built Nomad List, PhotoAI, etc, you might know him if you're in the indie hacker and startup space at all.

  [0] https://hoodmaps.com

• by faebi on 2/7/25, 9:50 PM

  I tried something similar myself but failed on wanting to load the whole world of openstreetmap onto my server and into postgres. It worked but I never managed to get sub second postgres query times on a billion rows. Hence, making it unsuable for any user.

  So my question to you. What's your server and data setup? Do you even have your own data? I'm very curious on what is actually needed to make it work anywhere.

• by tobr on 2/8/25, 7:04 AM

  I’ve been looking for something like this. On my phone it’s rather unclear how to interpret the heat map though. There’s some kind of broken tooltip. What do the colors represent? It looks like it would be the distance to the closest point rather than to all the points?

  How do you compute the heat map? Thousands of API requests from various points?

• by DonHopkins on 2/7/25, 11:34 PM

  It reminds me of the "Dynamic HomeFinder", developed by Christopher Williamson and Ben Shneiderman at the University of Maryland Human Computer Interaction Lab in the late 80's, which they published a paper about in SIGIR '92: "The Dynamic HomeFinder: Evaluating Dynamic Queries in a Real-Estate Information Exploration System".

  https://web.archive.org/web/20161119140228/http://hcil2.cs.u...

  >Abstract: We designed, implemented, and evaluated a new concept for visualizing and searching databases utilizing direct manipulation called dynamic queries. Dynamic queries allow users to formulate queries by adjusting graphical widgets, such as sliders, and see the results immediately. By providing a graphical visualization of the database and search results, users can find trends and exceptions easily. User testing was done with eighteen undergraduate students who performed significantly faster using a dynamic queries interface compared to both a natural language system and paper printouts. The interfaces were used to explore a real-estate database and find homes meeting specific search criteria.

  Here is a great talk by Ben where he states the goals of the visual information seeking process, and shows the Dynamic HomeFinder "thousand points of light" demo:

  User Interface Strategies 1990 (University of Maryland Television Broadcast) Part 1-5:

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yz_7nJN8jk0

  In 1992 I was inspired to implement a version of it for SimCity I called the "SimCity Frob-O-Matic Dynamic Zone Filter", and I wrote about it a few years ago on Hacker News, and linked to a video demo:

  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11370099

  DonHopkins on March 27, 2016 | parent | context | favorite | on: Direct Manipulation: A Step Beyond Programming Lan...

  Ben Shneiderman has made a career of performing controlled experiments, measuring the efficacy of different techniques, comparing them to each other in different contexts, and teaching his students the importance of empirical testing, balanced with human centered design. [1]

  He and Ike Nassi developed a goto-less visual programming technique called the Nassi-Shneiderman diagram [2]. He not only studied and summarized the status quo of flowcharting, but also conducted experiments that suggested flowcharts were not helpful for writing, understanding, or modifying computer programs.

  He's also done a lot of work with information visualization [3], including tree maps and dynamic query sliders, and developed systems and published papers that have inspired many other people.

  He and Christopher Williamson developed and empirically evaluated dynamic query sliders in the ingenious Dynamic Home Finder [4], which applies direct manipulation and infovis techniques to dynamic real time visual real-estate database queries. That inspired me to implement a similar real time information visualization technique in SimCity [5].

  By studying, measuring, comparing, and generalizing on what was really going on, he came up with these eight golden rules for interface design:

  1) Strive for consistency. Consistent sequences of actions should be required in similar situations...

  2) Enable frequent users to use shortcuts. As the frequency of use increases, so do the user's desires to reduce the number of interactions...

  3) Offer informative feedback. For every operator action, there should be some system feedback...

  4) Design dialog to yield closure. Sequences of actions should be organized into groups with a beginning, middle, and end...

  5) Offer simple error handling. As much as possible, design the system so the user cannot make a serious error...

  6) Permit easy reversal of actions. This feature relieves anxiety, since the user knows that errors can be undone...

  7) Support internal locus of control. Experienced operators strongly desire the sense that they are in charge of the system and that the system responds to their actions. Design the system to make users the initiators of actions rather than the responders.

  8) Reduce short-term memory load. The limitation of human information processing in short-term memory requires that displays be kept simple, multiple page displays be consolidated, window-motion frequency be reduced, and sufficient training time be allotted for codes, mnemonics, and sequences of actions.

  ----

  [1] An Empirical Comparison of Pie vs. Linear Menus: http://www.donhopkins.com/drupal/node/100

  [2] Nassi-Shneiderman diagram: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nassi%E2%80%93Shneiderman_diag...

  [3] InfoVis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_visualization

  [4] Dynamic Home Finder: http://hcil2.cs.umd.edu/trs/92-01/92-01.html

  [5] SimCity Frob-O-Matic Dynamic Zone Filter: https://youtu.be/_fVl4dGwUrA?t=3m35s

• by aantix on 2/7/25, 7:12 PM

  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.

• by robhh on 2/7/25, 7:13 PM

  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.