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

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

#41

Post by timita »

ultrafez wrote: post #39
timita wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is very cool - I haven't seen anything like it before. I've spent about half an hour noseying at places I've lived or considered living, fascinating. The view of changing house prices is something that I haven't seen presented in this way either. Thanks for building it and thanks for sharing.

Thanks for the kind words! The prototype was launched in 2013, you'd think the world would have caught up since :D. The platform underneath allows far more advanced functionality, so stick around, there will be many more usable (and useful) features in the near term.

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

#42

Post by 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.

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

#43

Post by ghostpepper »

drooby wrote: post #40

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"

You might prefer a more general walkability map, eg. https://www.walkscore.com

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

#46

Post by shric »

asdf6969 wrote: post #45

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

Everyone's preferences matter.

I know a homeless guy in Texas whom I talk to on IRC daily. Even he has preferences. He lives under a bridge near a library that gives him Internet access.

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

#47

Post by loxias »

drooby wrote: post #40

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"

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.

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

#48

Post by appreciatorBus »

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.

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

#49

Post by faebi »

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.

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

#50

Post by loxias »

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. ;)

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