Guidebooks can only tell us so much about the places we visit. Moving to a new city? Well, that gets trickier. If you want to find out what sort of neighbourhood your Airbnb rental is in or what place you’re moving into, a new site called Hoodmaps hopes to give you some idea. It features a crowdsourced map of 2,000 major cities to show which areas attract tourists, rich people, students, and “normies,” among many others. The site’s founder Pieter Levels got the idea from his own travels saying that it might be hard for people to figure out which parts of a city to check out and whether they are getting an authentic experience of the place. Levels even chronicled online how he built the site, so it might be a good thing to check out if you’re into web/app development.
The maps are color-coded and you can toggle overlays that appear on the map like tags, rent, home prices, and cafes. As pointed out though, this user-contributed aspect might perpetuate negative stereotypes about a place that may or may not be true. But if you are looking for a quick way to check what you can expect from a place, here’s one tool to help you. But, of course, exploring is still the best way to find out what a place has to offer.
Source: Lifehacker