What The Cost Of Renting An Apartment In Boston Looks Like
wbur.org
wbur.org
Another extension might be a third layer that indicates travel times to a destination of your choice.
Finally, demographic information might be useful.
End result: find an affordable place, in a safe neighbourhood populated by people like you. I realise the quality of data available would make this near-impossible. Today.
(The map isn't actually 1/time-to-park-street. It's average time from each point to every other point.)
Note that it largely correlates to the WalkScore for Boston: http://www.walkscore.com/MA/Boston
I don't know why people don't make walking a bigger deal in where they choose to live in the U.S. I love driving, but
A large part of the reason I've remained in New Hampshire is because my town is extremely walkable from my house, with several cafes, good restaurants, and my work all less than 10 minutes away by foot.
(Of course there are other reasons. I "run" a large victorian-era house and rent spare rooms to friends, living for effectively free. On the other hand, I also don't know why more young professionals don't do that, because the money I save is amazing, and the only downside are more chores, or people problems if you live with friends you end up not liking)
I'm originally from Phoenix, and it was always hard to imagine walking for any reason other than exercise when I lived there.
The guy who wrote Padmapper says this tool puts a pretty heavy load on his server and he
would rather it was run no more than once a month. If you're just looking for some
apartment data, I've put some in apts-2013-01-29, which is for Boston in January 2013.
That would be awesome.
The current code drawing code is probably too slow for this, though.
Euclidian distance away from: shops, travel, crime?
Anyone know of any papers?
The Manhattan and Euclidean distance on finite spaces both generalize to "l_p norms" (1 and 2, respectively) on an n-dimensional Euclidean space, where ||x||_p = (|x_0|^p + |x_1|^p + ... + |x_n|^p)^(1/p). You can even naturally define it in the limit where p goes to infinity!
The price per room seems like it would be more useful if it was shown as "price per room for 1bdrm" and able to be switched to 2bdrm or 3bdrm and so on.
Breaking it down by bedroom each map would have fewer points. The most common apartment size is the two bedroom, and there are only 986 listings there.
Saying that, West Cambridge and Davis Square are decent places to hide if you can afford it.
Enjoy, it's not _that_ bad ;-)
You make a good point.
That being said, if I hadn't moved to the bay area Boston would have been my second choice. I've spent most of my life in Massachusetts though so I'm a bit bias.
As a remote worker, the cost of living in Boston is just an unnecessary expense for me. Lower taxes too. My new rent + utilities is less than 800/mo for a 2br.