theretowhere
Consumer and social
housing search
SHOW HN2025
Legend
theretowhere
A website that heatmaps your city based on your housing preferences
theretowhere.com#isochrone map#apartment hunting#travel time heatmap#neighborhood finder
How HN took it
13 positive, 24 neutral or asking, 4 mixed, 16 critical, out of 57 comments about the project. Thread score -0.02.
Idea: 5 for, 5 againstExecution: 2 for, 4 againstDesign: 3 for, 3 againstPerformance: 2 for, 2 againstDocs: 0 for, 2 against
The thread, comment by comment
Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.
positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker
What HN said
What people liked
Useful for house hunting and validating current home location
From 3 comments
I'm not in the market for a new home right now but I would absolutely use this in a future search. As it is now, it helped me confirm that my house is in a great location for…
tsigo on HNI'm not sure why others have problems, but I love it! Once, in a similar situation, I had the thought that "somebody should build that" and never imagined that somebody actually…
Medicineguy on HNThis is incredible! I've been looking at new houses for a while now, trying to balance living next to a park, walking distance to elementary school and a grocery store, and…
losvedir on HN
Clean UX and no accounts
From 1 comment
This is really cool (and timely for me). Lovely work with the UX. No accounts, no nonsense. Kudos.
shekhar101 on HN
Objections
Generic categories like grocery store return too many distant venues
From 2 comments
This doesn't seem to work very well. Searching for "grocery store" netted me a set of 22 locations spread across the entire country.
duskwuff on HNI found it was surprisingly easy to "populate with every instance of a given type". I've made a few maps based on grocery and transit where I did it by adding all >100 stores &…
loxias on HN
Travel time estimates differ from Google Maps
From 2 comments
I love the idea, but the data seems a bit off. I tested it in my little city, where I'm < 14 minutes by car from the grocery. It's actually a little quicker, but I'm going by…
silisili on HNI'm not in the market for a new home right now but I would absolutely use this in a future search. As it is now, it helped me confirm that my house is in a great location for…
tsigo on HN
Mobile usability problems
From 2 comments
Great idea! But unfortunately the site was too hard for me to use on mobile (iOS, Brave browser). I was unable to set the location - when I tried to set the location, the screen…
oa335 on HNI’ve been looking for something like this. On my phone it’s rather unclear how to interpret the heat map though. There’s some kind of broken tooltip. What do the colors…
tobr on HN
Requests
Generic place categories and OR-style grouping
From 3 comments
This is cool but I don't think it fits my use case.. Seems like I have to pick criteria that have exact venues.. I want to pick abstract things like "walking distance from…
drooby on HNI don't really understand what the search nearby places button is doing. I think the solution would be to allow some sort of OR operator (which seems straightforward), or…
blehn on HNWould be nice to use conditions. Like, if there are multiple libraries in a city and I would like to evaluate being 15 minutes from any of them, have a condition able to be set -…
duckapricottuba on HN
Mixed transport modes such as bike plus transit
From 3 comments
I currently commute by train _and_ bike, but this only lets me filter by one or another, unfortunately. This seems to be a common problem with navigation systems in general. It's…
ignormies on HNThis is really cool! Well done. Like others, I'd love to specify generic things like distance to a "grocery store" or "gym" as part of my initial criteria. I see that I can add a…
davideg on HNWorks for Sydney, well done! I previously used Mapnificent to choose a house location, and found that many geographically closer properties were often much further in terms of…
richardw on HN
Negative criteria to avoid places like noise or sketchy storefronts
From 3 comments
Very cool! This is nice when considering moving to a new area to narrow down neighborhoods that could work. One thing that I think could be useful is to also add criteria for…
michaelmior on HNAn easy way to make this great tool twice as good: Allow inverted selections. I don't want to live near sketchy storefronts, and neither do other people less honest than myself.
dudeofea on HNSame, and I add one even more amorphous criteria, 'not directly next to noise pollution like an airport or highways.'
wilted-iris on HN
Collapsible criteria and better UI for adding places
From 3 comments
This is incredible! I've been looking at new houses for a while now, trying to balance living next to a park, walking distance to elementary school and a grocery store, and…
losvedir on HNSome suggestions: - option to select individual results of "Search nearby places" or select top N closest result to your location - collapsible criteria on the edit/view pages -…
Evidlo on HNThis is really cool! Well done. Like others, I'd love to specify generic things like distance to a "grocery store" or "gym" as part of my initial criteria. I see that I can add a…
davideg on HN
Questions
How are walking distances computed and what data is used
From 2 comments
This is really, really cool and thanks for making it!! We must think at least somewhat similarly, last few times I was apartment hunting I did the same, though I never polished…
loxias on HNI tried something similar myself but failed on wanting to load the whole world of openstreetmap onto my server and into postgres. It worked but I never managed to get sub second…
faebi on HN
What do the heatmap colors represent
From 1 comment
I’ve been looking for something like this. On my phone it’s rather unclear how to interpret the heat map though. There’s some kind of broken tooltip. What do the colors…
tobr on HN
Alternatives named
Walkscore
From 2 comments
You might prefer a more general walkability map, eg. https://www.walkscore.com
ghostpepper on HNI've always liked the idea of combining distance criteria, especially when something is good for public transit to work, but not good in terms of walkability to anything I care…
Terr_ on HN
Mapnificent
From 1 comment
Works for Sydney, well done! I previously used Mapnificent to choose a house location, and found that many geographically closer properties were often much further in terms of…
richardw on HN
Mapumental
From 1 comment
Tom Carden made the "mySociety Travel Time and House Price Maps" in 2007: https://www.tom-carden.co.uk/2008/01/24/mysociety-maps >O'Reilly Radar has the scoop on the most recent…
DonHopkins on HN
close.city
From 1 comment
There is another website that I've been using that provides similar functionality in terms of the heatmap: http://close.city What I like about this one is that it can show travel…
robhh on HN
Hood Maps
From 1 comment
See also, Hood Maps [0], a crowdsourced map of annotations of people's opinions on particular areas in a city. It's by Pieter Levels who built Nomad List, PhotoAI, etc, you might…
satvikpendem on HN