Portland Home Construction in the Rear-View Mirror
The past couple years have ushered in a wealth of consumer-friendly, real estate-related websites, with perhaps Zillow being the best known example. One of my favorites is Trulia’s home search site, and their new Hindsight application.
In short, Hindsight plots a sampling of an area’s home construction dates on top of a Microsoft Virtual Earth map. A timeline automatically starts scrolling from around the turn of the 20th century and as homes were built over time, they ‘bloom’ on the map.
Here is a view of the Portland timeline:
My little screen image shown above doesn’t do it justice. Click on the image or here to see it in its full glory.
It seems to jibe with my understanding of the age of Portland architecture and community development. The central city, primarily north and east along the riverbank is first, with post-WW2 construction commencing in East County and Beaverton, reaching out to Gresham and Aloha/Hillsboro in the ’70’s, and followed in roughly concentric circles out to the suburbs (West Linn, Tigard, Sherwood, Clackamas). The best way to view this is to stare at the middle of the screen and let your peripheral vision absorb the data as the timeline scrolls. You can zoom in for even more detail.
How helpful is this? If you’re not from Portland or familiar with the area, you can pause, then slowly advance the scrollbar on the timeline to see where the homes of vintage construction have been built. If you want to know for example, where the historic homes of West Linn are built, this tool could easily give you some clues.
If nothing else, it’s fun….this coming from a real estate/mapping junkie 
Technorati Tags: Portland, Oregon, Trulia, Hindsight, web 2.0, maps, homes, construction, architecture
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2 comments August 6th, 2007
