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

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)

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

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.

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

I love the idea, but the data seems a bit off. I tested it in my little city, where I'm 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!

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.