

What The Cost Of Renting An Apartment In Boston Looks Like - crisnoble
http://www.wbur.org/2013/01/30/boston-apartments-heat-map

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alexhawdon
Might be interesting to combine the data with that from fear.com (sorry -
police.uk, or whatever the equivalent site is in your country if you have one)
to locate places where lower rents intersect with favourable crime-rates.

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.

~~~
amalcon
This particular map can be approximated pretty well by the function 1/(public
transit time to Park Street Station). There are a few exceptions, mostly in
areas with higher crime rates than the rest of the region.

~~~
cbr
I also made a map of that: <http://www.jefftk.com/boston_transit_quality>
(details: <http://www.jefftk.com/news/2010-11-17>)

(The map isn't actually 1/time-to-park-street. It's average time from each
point to every other point.)

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simonsarris
Walking is valuable.

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)

~~~
mahmud
I live in the country side and walk to my office through farms, cows, horses,
and crops.

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crisnoble
Want to create one for your city? Here is the source:
<https://github.com/jeffkaufman/apartment_prices>

~~~
aGHz
From
[https://github.com/jeffkaufman/apartment_prices/blob/master/...](https://github.com/jeffkaufman/apartment_prices/blob/master/query_padmapper.py#L103-L105)

    
    
      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.
    

Please be considerate when running this. It does multiple querries to
padmapper, one for each choice in number of bedrooms (0 to 9) times the number
of 25$ increments in rent between 100$ and MAX_RENT. Consider tweaking those
variables and maybe the 100 lower limit at
[https://github.com/jeffkaufman/apartment_prices/blob/master/...](https://github.com/jeffkaufman/apartment_prices/blob/master/query_padmapper.py#L85)

~~~
cbr
When I first wrote it I talked to padmapper, and they said that as long as I
wasn't going to run it very often it made more sense to keep with the horribly
inefficient method in query_padmapper.py than for him to put a bunch of time
into making something fancier available. Though a dump of the whole country
doesn't sound like it would be that hard and making a US-sized map would be
awesome.

~~~
ericd
Yeah, it's a bit more worrying that it's public code, but I imagine that it
will be fairly limited, and it seems like people find it useful, so it's
probably not a big deal as long as people don't use it too frequently. If
there's enough interest, perhaps I should make this heatmap an option on PM
itself so that people don't have to all make their own? Would you be OK with
my using the code for that?

~~~
cbr
> perhaps I should make this heatmap an option on PM itself so that people
> don't have to all make their own?

That would be awesome.

The current code drawing code is probably too slow for this, though.

~~~
ericd
Cool cool. It'll probably take me longer if it needs to be rewritten. I guess
it's not tile-based?

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crazcarl
What is the value of an aggregated price per room across all apartment sizes?
A 1 room apartment is going to cost more than half of a 2 room apartment,
which is going to cost more than one third of a 3 room apartment.

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.

~~~
cbr
What you say would be true for bedrooms, but one of the two maps I made is for
rooms (1+bedrooms): <http://www.jefftk.com/apartment_prices/rooms-2013-01>

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.

~~~
cbr
You know, 986 samples ought to be enough. Here's a map of just the two bedroom
apartments: <http://www.jefftk.com/apartment_prices/rooms-2013-01--2br>

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smootypoot
The most costly factor is the fact that you would be living in Boston.

~~~
justforthispost
I assume the comment above is facetious but, as someone who would like to move
to the US for work, I'm curious why people living in other big cities dislike
Boston?

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tedivm
I love Boston, but the weather can be unbearably annoying at times.
Massachusetts is all about extremes, with high heat and humidity in the summer
and freezing cold temperatures in the winter. Combine this with a lot of rain,
snow and in between and you've got Boston.

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.

~~~
justforthispost
Thanks. I don't like extreme cold but if that's the worse thing about Boston
then it doesn't sound so bad.

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gnosis
I wonder how different the map would look if it showed median price/bedroom
rather than the mean.

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readme
My personal title: "Why I moved to New Hampshire"

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.

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akurilin
1800 / bedroom? That'd be an amazing deal in SF.

~~~
ghc
I was puzzled by this too, but I think it's an artifact of the way the map is
done. I live in one of those $1800+ zones and I couldn't find a 1BR on the
market for under $3000 last summer. My guess would be that mean per bedroom
would be $2500 in that area (including studios and economy of scale for larger
places), but I bet it gets lumped in with $1800+.

~~~
nirvanatikku
Agreed. I live in Kendall Square, and over the past two years rent has gone up
10%, and _studio's_ start at $2700. in this area 1BR > $3K.

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api
What they don't include here is the money you end up spending repairing the
apartment (yes, repairing an apartment) to make it livable. At least I saw a
fair bit of this in Boston. Unless you want to spend an utter fortune, you
might be getting an overpriced slum.

~~~
cbr
What sort of repairs are you talking about? The only times apartments I've
lived in have needed repairs we asked the landlord to do them.

