Show HN: A website that heatmaps your city based on your housing preferences (theretowhere.com)
- 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.
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?”
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?”
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)
103 comments
[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 169 ms ] threadI 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.
- 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.
Ideally something like 5min bike ride to the grocery store, 15min walk from a train station, and 30min drive to my in-law’s house.
It would be really interesting to do something like “10 minute bike ride to 3 or more grocery stores”. That would help reduce instances of niche specific stores, but also provides a much more useful variety.
I’d love to be able to find places that have 2+ or 3+ grocery stores within somewhat reasonable distance, and same thing goes for restaurants. Really any restaurant.
1. User defines a "multi-location" spec, like "MyFastFood" as "Having [2] or more of [Fast Food] excluding [Taco Bell,]"
2. User defines a requirement for their heat map which references the multi-location, ex: "Within [30 minutes] to [walk] to [MyFastFood]"
3. Within the context of a particular [user's requirement] and broad [city/town/region], a 2D area/gradient can be generated, and cached for a rather considerable period given how slowly businesses open/close.
Granted, that's the ambitious version. A simpler one would be to not support "at least X", and to combine the multi-location and the distance-rules all together into a single condition.
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.
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.
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.
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!
Six miles is like a 30 minute drive when I am
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.
15 minutes from: Library A OR Library B OR Library C
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
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"?
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.
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).
The main page has references to all data sources.
Thanks for building it and thanks for sharing.
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.
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.
[1]: https://close.city/?x=-73.92368&y=40.74092&z=11.62779&r=0&l=...
[2]: https://close.city/?x=-122.32293&y=47.63375&z=12.62654&r=0&l...
https://theretowhere.com/we-got-an-extension-babyyyy
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!
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"
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.
I'll make this an impossible state, thanks for bringing this up.
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42978067
> 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.
https://exoroad.com
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.
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.
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. ;)
I do like that you used OSM rather than Google maps.
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
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.