About AreaProfile

AreaProfile answers one question as well as it can: what is it actually like to live here?

What it is

Someone considering a move currently needs half a dozen websites — one for demographics, another for the job market, another for weather, another for flood maps, another for whether anything is being built. Each presents its numbers differently, and none of them let you compare two places on the same terms. AreaProfile collects those sources itself, normalizes them against one geographic model, keeps the history, and produces a single coherent profile for each place.

How it is built

AreaProfile is not a front end over someone else’s prepared dataset. It downloads each dataset from the agency that publishes it — the school data through the Urban Institute, which republishes the federal files unaltered — keeps an exact copy of every file, matches each figure to its own map of states, counties, cities and ZIP areas, and calculates its own signals and scores. The sources are public; the normalization, the history, the geographic model and the calculations are AreaProfile’s.

Today that means 70,333 locations in the geographic model, 2,706,298 normalized measurements, 4,371,227 historical data points, and 9,533 published profiles across 19 authoritative sources.

What it will not do

• Fabricate a number, a source date, or a geographic mapping.
• Publish a score calculated from insufficient data.
• Hide a gap in the data behind confident-sounding prose.
• Present a page as fresh because the HTML was regenerated today.
• Tell you a place is good. It will tell you what the data says and let you weight it.

Who runs this

AreaProfile is independently built and operated. It is not venture-backed, it is not a front for a data broker or a real-estate business, and it is not a team — the addresses on the contact page reach the person who built it, and corrections are answered by the same person who would have to fix the code behind them.

That is worth stating plainly because of what this site publishes. Crime rates, hazard exposure, school results and housing costs are things people move house on. Nobody pays to appear here, nobody pays to be scored differently, and there is no agency or listings business whose interests a figure could be bent toward. Advertising, where it runs, is served by Google and cannot influence a figure. The corrections policy describes what happens when a figure is wrong, and the archived copy of every source means a correction is a matter of looking rather than arguing.

Independence

AreaProfile is independent. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by the U.S. Census Bureau, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, FEMA, NOAA, the FAA or any other agency whose data it uses. Scores, percentiles, signals, hazard ratings and rankings are AreaProfile calculations.

Read further

The methodology explains every calculation. Data sources lists every dataset with its terms. The editorial policy covers how the statements on a profile are written, and what this site will not say.