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Awhile back, we wrote about a very cool website called Walkscore, a Google Maps mashup that tells you how walkable your neighborhood is, based on factors like your home’s distance from basic services, food, entertainment and other things. Now Walkscore has a sibling — a website called Optimal Home Location (not that catchy, granted, but true to its name), which is the perfect tool to use before you move somewhere in order to achieve maximum neighborhood walkability.
Even if your new neighborhood/life isn’t “walkable” per se, this tool should do much to guide your house-hunting, and at least reduce your commute, which is something we can all get behind. It works like this: you tell it where you and your family work and play — entering all the addresses of the places you regularly go — and its handy calculator will weight them all according to importance and frequency of travel, and find you a place to live more or less in the center of it all, where you can live using the least amount of gas (and just as important, travel time) possible.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t take home prices or skeezy-ness of neighborhood into account, but it will allow you to choose a number of different neighborhoods and compare the commutes, so you can self-filter. Not to mention the fact that a pricier house near the places you work and play might end up being less expensive in the long run than living way out in the ‘burbs and commuting. (For those of you moving to a new city, it helps to have a friend on the ground: a friend of mine is considering moving from Florida to Los Angeles in the near future, and was very surprised to learn that the neighborhood she was considering is easily an hour’s commute from the heart of the city. That’s traffic for ya.)
Anybody wishing they’d had a tool like this before they picked a new house?
Comments (10)
Comment
As far as L.A. goes, I think an hour commute is about the best you can hope for.
posted by 8rustystaples on 12-4-2008 at 11:24 am
My husband and I traded a 90-minute commute from New Jersey to Manhattan for a fixer-upper in a small Virginia town. We live just outside downtown, and can pretty much walk to all four (North, South, East, and West) borders of the city from our house. My commute is now a ten-minute walk. Definitely a better life. Besides, even though it was a marginal neighborhood when we moved here ten years ago, so many people were buying houses on our block that now every house has been renovated and it’s a great neighborhood. Fear not the skeeve!
Captcha: singular owners
posted by Southern Buddhist on 12-4-2008 at 11:32 am
This did not work at all for me. It put me in the middle of the water in Long Island Sound!
posted by Gussiebuns on 12-4-2008 at 1:25 pm
A website like this would have been great. My wife and I took no less than 15 trips to Columbus Ohio (one hour each way) searching out neighborhoods and the best location and a good deal. This would have saved alot of time and money as gas was almost $4.00 a gallon at the time.
posted by J on 12-4-2008 at 1:30 pm
This would have been nice to have when my family moved over the summer. We ended up downgrading from a perfect 100 walk-score to a 35 walk-score.
Even though we were moving from a city to a suburb (out of necessity), I think we could have done better than 35.
posted by MF on 12-4-2008 at 2:00 pm
My walkscore was surprisingly high because many of the allegedly walkable destinations are in bad neighborhoods and way too uphill to even consider.
posted by Jeff on 12-4-2008 at 5:10 pm
My walkscore was 9… out of one hundred. When you live in the mountains in Tucson, AZ, I don’t think you can get much higher.
posted by Amanda on 12-4-2008 at 6:40 pm
I’m a little surprised – my neighborhood got a 71/100.
You couldn’t pay me to walk down these streets, alone or otherwise. They’re fairly busy main streets, but it’s still too dangerous. (I hope to move soon.)
posted by Yikes on 12-4-2008 at 9:38 pm
My address scored a 51 but a lot of the things listed, such as drug stores, coffeeshops, etc, are either not those things at all (it lists a Johnson & Johnson research facility as a drug store) or non-existent. The closest bar it listed has had three different names since the listing name, been torn down twice, and is currently a liquor store. Bizarre.
posted by Rachel on 12-5-2008 at 9:48 am
The Optimal Home Location tool is interesting, but could be better if it let me weight the places I go. Work 5 times a week, gym three times a week, friend’s house twice a week, etc. This is a neat tool, but told me information I already knew about my town.
On the other hand, my current Walkscore (suburban Baton Rouge) is 22, which I find high. It doesn’t seem to take into account no sidewalks and too many crazy drivers. The neighborhood I want to live in has a walk score of 71.
My old address in Dallas has an awesome Walkscore of 89. I miss that.
posted by Lindsey on 12-5-2008 at 2:17 pm