Are You Safe in the Neighborhood You Are Moving Into?

• August 19th 2009

by Mark Wellborn

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Back in March, we wrote about iLive.at, a website that provides information (demographic, shopping, transportation, etc.) for specific addresses in DC, a good tool for anyone having trouble figuring out where to live in the city.

The creators of this helpful site came out with an innovative follow-up earlier this year that could be useful to home buyers. The application (for the iPhone, of course) is called Are You Safe and it provides the user with an array of crime stats based on where they are in DC. The crime level is laid out for the user via the three visuals outlined below:

1) The Threat Meter – Using the 34,000 DC crime incidents reported in 2008 mixed with census data, a crime heat map is created for the entire city, broken down by two square block segments. When a location is entered, the application determines what grid point the user is in, and that grid point’s safety level is represented on the threat meter. The heat map for DC can be seen here.

2) Crimes in Immediate Vicinity – This visual provides data on four categories: homicide, assault, robberies and car thefts. Based on where you are in the city, a live query is done and provides data for these categories within .2 miles of your location.

3) Closest Crime – This option allows a user to see the closest crime to their location. He/she must click on the “crimes in immediate vicinity” tab, and the closest incident to the individual is provided.

For home and condo buyers, this tool is particularly useful as real estate agents (due to their code of ethics) are restricted from providing perspective on the crime level of a certain neighborhood.

“People really get a kick out of driving with the app open and seeing the meter change every couple of blocks,” co-creator Benjamin Mokotoff told UrbanTurf. “They also like checking the closest crime every time they stop at a stop light.”

Mokotoff, along with fellow creators Travis Hurant and Brian Sobel, have already launched Are You Safe in Atlanta and Sacramento and Milwaukee, Dallas and Indianapolis are on the horizon. If you are interested in learning more about this application, click here.

This article originally published at http://dc.urbanturf.production.logicbrush.com/articles/blog/are_you_safe_in_the_neighborhood_you_are_moving_into/1248.