With the recession ravaging home values all over the nation, it seemed about time to do some looking locally. One of our pair of excellent database reporters got data from the county assessor’s office and crunched it up by neighborhood and from that I was able to piece together this map.
The map itself is pretty standard. I built it off of a boilerplate I put together after working on the tornado map. I borrowed the Google Charts idea from my census work and had the basic map up and working in an afternoon.
The only innovation — for us, at least — was adding a way to search for your address using Google’s geocoder. I think it worked very well for this project, since the location of the property you owned was paramount to its usefulness. I haven’t included the geocoder option in many later maps for two reasons: 1. I felt like they didn’t need the function quite badly. 2. The API limits on the geocoder are severe and small and ever more so. It just didn’t make sense to use a function that might not work if the map is actually successful.
And the map was successful. In our year-end review of traffic numbers this map was easily one of our most popular. I suppose that means that if you can find something that people care about — their property — and work with that, then they will be interested.