Boston Apartment Prices Map

June 18th, 2011
housing, map, tech
I made a map of boston area apartment listings, colored by price per bedroom:


(I also made a larger interactive version)

The data comes from the excellent site padmapper that gets its listings from craigslist and elsewhere. The data points are black dots. The farther you are from dots and the less dense they are in an area, the less accurate it will be. The data is current; I'll probably do another one once all the 9/1 apartments are on the market.

The interpolation is inverse distance weighted averaging, where I'm lazy and am using simple cartesian distance on lat/lon instead of real great circle distance. Locations that don't have at least five data points within some threshold distance are left transparent.

Update 2011-10-07: Michael Bergman writes in:

Something outside your data that I noted a number of years ago when looking at both rentals and homes for sale is that in Cambridge, a placed listed as a 2-bedroom apartment had two bedrooms, a bath, and a kitchen; in Somerville it had two bedrooms, a living room, a bath, and a kitchen (and maybe some storage space in the basement); and in Arlington it had two bedrooms, a dining room, a living room, maybe an enclosed sun porch, a bath, a kitchen--and half a cellar
This suggests doing something by square foot would be good, though I don't think I can get that data as easily. So something to keep in mind: in the cheaper areas, landlords have likely made less of an attempt to convert any space that could possibly be a bedroom into one.

Update 2012-06-29: Someone suggested it made more sense to plot price per room instead of price per bedroom. Assuming that each apartment had one more room then bedroom I generated a new map.

Referenced in:

Comment via: facebook, r/boston, substack

Recent posts on blogs I like:

Linkpost for July

Effective Altruism

via Thing of Things July 3, 2026

Agentic test processes, LLM benchmarks, and other notes on agentic coding from Galapagos Island

I've been using AI fairly heavily since last November and the whole thing is a funny experience. An agent will do something that, if a human did it, you'd immediately fire them. My reaction, of course, is to act as if this is great and spin up a t…

via Posts on July 3, 2026

Variable fonts aren't universally supported

I make a lot of webpages. I also use Lockdown Mode on iOS and MacOS for a bit of extra security. Sometimes I realize that I forgot to test on Safari and it looks like crap, or I test and don’t notice that there’s been a problem for months (as was the case…

via Home June 27, 2026

more     (via openring)