If you’re looking for a cheap place to rent, chances are that you’ll have quite a few options in the shadier parts of town. If you’re moving to a new city, you might have no clue what the nice parts of town are vs. the shady parts of town.
For example, I recently moved to Silicon Valley, and I’ve always heard that Palo Alto was really nice. After all, it was the birthplace of Apple Computer and a bunch of other big companies, and a lot of very rich company founders live there. It turns out that that’s West Palo Alto that everyone’s singing praises about. East Palo Alto was actually the murder capitol of the US for a while pretty recently.
This cluelessness, which almost had me living in a former murder capitol, is why I’ve been working on something to show you what the crime rates of different areas of town are.
I’ve just rolled it out in San Francisco, and other cities should be forthcoming if the response is good. Red means high crime, green means low crime, yellow is in between, and blank is either extremely low crime or a lack of data (in SF it means very few crimes were reported in those areas). The labels in the picture above are hard to read, but the red dot in the middle of SF is the Tenderloin. Wikipedia even has a pretty large section about the crime of the Tenderloin.
To access the crime overlay, go to PadMapper for San Francisco apartments, go into the filters, open up “Super Secret Advanced Features”, and check on the “Crime Overlay” checkbox. It might take a bit to load, so don’t worry if it doesn’t appear immediately.
Alternately, you can just check out the crime map by itself.
And please let me know if you find it useful or stunningly unuseful by emailing me at padmapper@gmail.com. If you’re looking for an apartment to rent in San Francisco, it should be pretty helpful.
Ah!! I was just thinking about this problem the other day! I’m moving in 6 months across country to Florida and was wondering how I’d find out which neighborhoods were ‘good’ and which ones were no-no’s. This is a fantastic idea 🙂 Hopefully it’ll expand beyond SoCal to other cities soon so I can use it!
Thanks! It’s since been expanded to a bunch of other cities, actually. If you want to check whether the city you’re moving to is supported, just check on the crime overlay checkbox when you’re looking at that city, and if it shows up, you’re in luck.