Guides & methodology

Everything we publish about how BelongMaps works, and what the data behind it can and cannot tell you. No sign-up needed to read any of it.

Guides

• How to find a place to rent — Pick the neighborhood before the apartment. A step-by-step way to narrow a city down to a few areas using commute, safety and rent, in about twenty minutes.
• Affording where you want to live — When the budget and the map do not meet, one requirement is usually costing most of the money. How to find which, and where a compromise buys you something.
• Why crime maps disagree — Crime reporting to the FBI is voluntary, and the gaps are large. Why three crime maps give three answers for the same neighborhood, and how to read any of them.
• Which states report crime data — Only 63.5% of US law enforcement agencies are certified for the FBI incident-level crime system. Pennsylvania is at 15%. The gap by state, from FBI data.
• Neighborhood data glossary — Plain-English definitions for the terms behind neighborhood data: block groups, flood zones, NIBRS, isochrones, median vs average, hardiness zones and more.

How we measure things

• How commute times work — How to map everywhere you could live within a given commute, by car or transit, how to overlap two commutes for a household, and what the travel times assume.
• How we measure neighborhood crime — How BelongMaps calculates neighborhood crime rates: small census areas adjusted for population, drawn from FBI and police data, and why some areas stay blank.
• How we score schools — How BelongMaps rates every public and private K-12 school from 1 to 10 using free public data, why growth beats proficiency, and what the score cannot tell you.
• How we show flood risk — What FEMA flood zones tell you, what the zone letters mean, why the maps age, and why being outside a flood zone does not mean a property will not flood.
• How we show housing costs — Why we build home costs from recorded sales rather than listings, what the rent figures actually measure, and what an area cost number cannot tell you.
• How we show wildfire risk — What the wildfire hazard layer measures, why it changes over short distances, what it cannot see about your actual house, and why insurance makes it matter.
• What planting zone am I in? — What USDA hardiness zones mean, why your neighbor may be in a different one, what changed in the 2023 update, and what the zone number cannot tell you.

Why we write these

Most sites that rank neighborhoods will not tell you where their numbers come from. That is usually because the answer is unflattering. We would rather show our working, including the parts where the data is thin or missing.

If something here is unclear or looks wrong, we would like to know.

The map itself is here, and free to use.