With all of my recent talk about moving, I thought I’d pass along a few of my favorite tools for checking out a new location.
- WalkScore.com The intent of this site is to tell you how “walkable” a particular neighborhood is – that is, how much of what you need access to you can get to without a car. A side benefit, though, is learning what’s nearby, without having to actually be at the new address. You put in the address and it calculates the Walk Score, based on how far you have to go to get to local libraries, grocery stores, etc. It also lists the first so many locations in each category. (Seven, I think, or everything within a certain distance if there are fewer than seven.) For example, within two miles of our new address, there is a Food Lion, a bunch of gas stations, at least seven restaurants, a Starbucks, a Dunkin Donuts, two parks, five fitness centers, two drugstores, and three hardware stores. (And it considers us “car-dependent.” I think you have to actually be in the heart of a city to get a “good” Walk Score.)
- Sperling’s Best Places There are other cost-of-living calculators, and it can actually be helpful to use more than one and compare the information. I like this one best, though, if you’re going to only look at one. It not only has cost-of-living information (and will compare with your current location), it has a lot of other local and demographic information, as well. Weather, employment rate, schools, crime rate, ethnicity and age demographics, religion, etc.
- Zip Skinny For a shorter, less complex version of the demographic information, try Zip Skinny.
- Tiny Geo-Coder If all you need is the latitude and longitude for an area, try this one. It is useful for generating maps at certain other sites.
- Topozone I used to like this one for generating topographical maps of a location (by inputting the latitude and longitude obtained from one of the other sites), but it’s been sucked up by Trails.com and is no longer free. 🙁 I can no longer find anything similar, so if you find something, I’d love to see it.
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