The Swamp

House Hunting Google Maps Mashup Ideas

August 28th, 2008 at 4:23 pm (Ideas)

My brain doesn’t feel psychological right now and I think I’m burned out from all the work I did yesterday, so I’m doing some house hunting. I’m looking on craigslist, and all the apartments I’ve come across are pretty much the same with the exception of price. I’m most interested in location, so I’m making a google map of all the places that interest me.

I think a really fleshed out house hunting google mashup would be so useful in this situation. I’m not just talking about taking a feed from craigslist and a few other apartment rental websites and overlaying them on a google map. I’m talking about having information on every possible thing that could interest a house hunter. Here are some ideas:

• Noise. This would be a combination of noise complaint information gathered by the Toronto Police, and external sources that track noise from traffic, industry, hustle bustle, etc. It would be neat if cell phone providers could collect information on the amount of background noise in phone calls along with which cell tower they’re connected to, but obviously that would be a violation of privacy unless people opted in, which definitely wouldn’t happen. It would also be neat if companies responsible for measuring work safety all sent noise level data to a central area to construct a map of average noise across the GTA. The Beau sent me this data from Transport Canada projecting noise from airplanes. (BTW, if you need any info about airplanes, he’s your guy in the sky.) There are many ways you could get this sort of data, and I know I would find it invaluable for choosing a place to live.
• Crime. The Toronto Star is supposed to have a mashup of homicide stats and grow-ops, but the homicide one doesn’t seem to be working at the moment. This Spot Crime site is useful, too. I would have though Scarborough would be more dangerous than it appears on this map. Knowing about homicides may be useful, but they can be pretty rare and pretty random. They also have a very high vividness, so even hearing about one murder (like the execution-style murder that happened at a grow-op down the street from us) could make you avoid an otherwise completely safe area. I’d be interested in muggings, rapes and bicycle thefts (although not necessarily in that order). The best way to display this data would be some sort of per capita probability, so denser areas don’t automatically look like more dangerous areas.
• Schools and employment. I’m not in this boat yet, but knowing the level of education and possibilities for employment in a particular area would be useful for new families. You could easily include EQAO stats for schools in your areas of interest (that shows how well schools are doing on standardized tests), average income for a particular area or what industry sectors are most active.
• TTC Routes and Timing. This one is obvious. Knowing about access to public transportation (especially for someone without a car, like me) would make a big difference to a lot of people. Knowing how long a particular trip would take would be even more useful. And since the TTC have been slacking off on their Trip Planner for years, I say it’s up to us to figure this out. All we need is for everyone in the city to log in and tell a site how long their morning and afternoon trips take. You can bet there will also be a couple TTC obsessives who would put in their data every single day. A few algorithms later, and kapow! We have realistic estimates for bus routes across the city, and also across time.

More ideas as I think of them.