A few winters ago, a friend called me the night before she was supposed to sign a lease on a place outside Nashville. She'd flown down twice, walked the block, met the neighbors. But on the phone she sounded stuck. “I don't actually know anything about this town,” she said. “I know what the Zillow listing says and I know what one real estate agent told me. That's it.”
She signed the lease. It worked out, mostly. But the conversation stayed with me because of how ordinary it was. People decide where to spend the next chunk of their life based on a Saturday visit, a school's Google rating, and a gut feeling. The information that would actually help them is public, collected at taxpayer expense by the Census Bureau and the CDC and the EPA and a dozen other agencies, and it sits in spreadsheets that nobody reads.
We built hearthmap because that bothered us.
What hearthmap is, in plain terms
hearthmap is an interactive map of the United States that shades every state, county, town, ZIP code, or census tract by whatever data point you pick. Choose “median home price” and the whole country paints itself in a gradient from cheap to expensive. Choose “percent proficient in math” and the map redraws itself around schools. Zoom out to see the national picture. Zoom in until you're looking at individual tracts inside your own city.
The data isn't scraped from listings or crowdsourced from strangers. It comes from the Census Bureau, the BLS, the EPA, the CDC, the FBI, the NCES, FEMA, NOAA, the USDA, HUD, and the USGS, plus Zillow and Redfin for housing. The same sources journalists and researchers use. We're not inventing new numbers; we're just making the real ones legible.
The feature we're proudest of is called Match Score. Instead of picking one metric and staring at one map, you build a weighted list of things you care about. Maybe schools matter a lot, commute time matters some, crime matters a little, and you want median home price under five hundred thousand. hearthmap combines those into a single 0-to-100 percent match for every region in the country and paints the map accordingly. Your ideal places light up. Everywhere else fades.
This is the part that's genuinely different. Zillow can tell you what Zillow thinks is a good place to live. hearthmap tells you what you think is a good place to live, across the entire country, at a glance.
Here's what that actually looks like in four situations we hear about constantly.
The new-job relocation
You got an offer in Raleigh. Or Minneapolis, or Austin, or somewhere you've been exactly once, for a wedding, eight years ago. You have six weeks to figure out where to live.
The standard move is to ask coworkers and post on Reddit and fly out for a weekend. You'll hear confident opinions from three people who all live in the same neighborhood and assume everyone should. You'll drive around and like the look of a main street.
hearthmap gives you a different first pass. Load Wake County and color it by school district math proficiency. Switch the overlay to violent crime rate. Switch again to median home price, then to days on market (if homes are sitting for 55 days in one ZIP and moving in 11 in another, something is going on). Add a weight for transit access if you care about not owning two cars. In ten minutes of scanning, three or four ZIP codes separate themselves from the pack. Those are the ones worth a scouting trip. You haven't replaced the trip; you've just stopped wasting it on neighborhoods that were never going to work for you.
I know someone who did exactly this for a move to central Ohio last year. She came in thinking she wanted to be downtown. The map, shaded by her weights (schools heavy, commute medium, price hard-capped at 450k), kept pulling her toward two suburbs on the north side she'd never heard of. She trusted the data enough to visit. She lives in one of them now.
The move across your own town
This one gets overlooked, but it's maybe the most common use. You already live in Columbus or Sacramento or Hartford. You're not relocating; you're just thinking about whether to move three miles. Maybe your kid is about to start kindergarten. Maybe your lease is ending.
You think the neighborhood across town has better schools and lower taxes. That's the reputation. But reputations lag reality by ten or twenty years. You want to know whether your kid's elementary scores higher than the one they'd go to now, what the actual mill rate difference is on a 400k home, whether the radon zone is worse one town over. None of those are things you can Google in any honest way.
Zoom hearthmap into tract-level detail and the fog clears fast. The property tax mill rate in Greenwich and the mill rate in Hartford are not in the same universe, and neither are the schools, but people who haven't looked closely tend to have vague, wrong impressions of both. Looking at the actual numbers, side by side, shaded on the map, is a small thing that changes decisions.
Vacation homes and retirement hunting
The criteria here are completely different, which is why Match Score matters more in this mode than anywhere else. Nobody retires the same way.
One person wants warm, walkable, and near good hospitals. Life expectancy at birth is a reasonable proxy for healthcare quality, and we surface it directly. NOAA sunny days per year matters to them. The EPA walkability index matters. Median home price matters. They don't care at all about school test scores.
Another person wants quiet and cheap and near a lake. A third wants to be close to a specific faith community, and our religious composition layer (percent Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, non-religious, and so on) turns out to be a surprisingly honest lens for whether a place has “their people.” We weren't sure about including that layer at first. We kept it because every time we showed the map to someone over 55, they asked about it.
Weight your criteria, watch the country repaint itself, and the short list of places worth visiting writes itself. A couple we talked to last fall was choosing between a winter home in Arizona and one in coastal South Carolina. The Match Score map, with their weights (sunny days heavy, cost of living medium, FEMA disaster risk hard-capped), made the decision in about five minutes. It wasn't either of those places. It was a town in New Mexico neither of them had considered.
The place you already live
This is the soft use case, and it might be my favorite.
You've lived in your town for twenty years. You have opinions about it. But how does your air quality actually compare to the county next door? Is your PM2.5 higher or lower than the state average? Are your schools where you assumed, or did the story change while you weren't watching? Is your town's violent crime rate what it was in 2005, or has it halved? (In most places, it has halved, and almost nobody believes it.)
hearthmap works as a kind of telescope for your own ZIP code. You don't need to move anywhere to use it. You just get to see yourself clearly, to see where you rank on things you've had fuzzy feelings about for years. People tend to come out of this use case a little proud of where they live, a little more honest about its weak spots, and a lot more interested in civic data in general. That's a good outcome for a map to produce.
A small closing thought
Choosing where to live is one of the three or four biggest decisions most people ever make. It shapes your kids' education, your marriage, your commute, your friendships, your body's exposure to air and water and noise, your mortgage, your politics, probably your life expectancy. We make this decision, typically, based on a weekend visit and whatever our brother-in-law said at Thanksgiving.
There's no reason for that, other than that the good data has historically been locked inside PDFs and academic papers and government FTP servers that most people don't know exist.
hearthmap is our attempt to open one of those doors. Not to tell you where to live; we have no idea where you should live. It's to let you see the country honestly, at whatever zoom level you need, through whichever lens matters to you. The map won't make the decision. It'll just mean you made it with your eyes open.