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Comment by ghshephard | Hacker News Reader

I guess a lot depends on where you live - Craigslist in the Bay area is like magic for finding apartments, or a room to rent.

The Bay Area has a very advanced craigslist option, where you can sort not only by geographic area (Peninsula), you can even zoom down to a particular city. Add filtering by price and find a place to live in the Bay area has always (Since 2003) been painless for me - particularly as I don't drive, and so getting a place that is _precisely_ in the right place is important. Housingmaps provides a free map interface for those who find such a thing useful.

I don't actually know how anyone would _improve_ craigslist (for me) - I am not sure what the disruption would be - as the free service provides me 100% of what I would want from such a system.

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Yeah but that still sucks, because people rarely know which neighborhood they are in. With padmapper, I could see exactly what was where and not have to worry about somebody thinking excelsior is somehow the mission, and the price per room/cats and dogs/walk score/etc... extras are amazing and integrated, especially if you don't know an area.

I guess you haven't really used padmapper if you don't understand how anyone could improve craigslist for you.

>> Yeah but that still sucks, because people rarely know which neighborhood they are in.

"rarely" is a tough word. I have found the city to be pretty well demarcated unless you are talking about people confused about minor issues such as what counts as Lower Haight and what counts as Upper Haight.

>> I guess you haven't really used padmapper if you don't understand how anyone could improve craigslist for you.

I used Padmapper as a newbie to the city but quickly found that the latency between postings on CL and the corresponding crawled updates on Padmapper were so high that the postings would have already been hit by a few dozen responses by the time I got it and in a hyper-competitive housing market like SF, this made all the difference.

If you're looking on the Peninsula, where school districts and crime levels vary by street within the same time, Padmapper is vastly better than craigslist.

I mean, look at all the misleading fucking tools who post "Palo Alto apartment for $1k/mo" which is actually in EAST PALO ALTO. With padmapper, it is clear. (In Menlo Park, where some areas are unincorporated, some are Menlo Park, some are Menlo Park but a warzone (Belle Haven, aka EPA North), etc., it's even more essential).

In Boston, every listing is contaminated with mentions of every single nearby neighborhood to take advantage of Craigslist's comically broken search functionality. Search "back bay", and you end up with listings in Somerville, since it's "NEAR BACK BAY SOUTH END CAMBRIDGE BROOKLINE" etc etc etc.

Apartment hunting on Craigslist is a total nightmare without Padmapper, and I'm resenting Craigslist more and more for relegating us all to using their horrible UI.

It's hell here in Austin. The listings are so polluted with realtors, you can't find anything that's not a giant complex.

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