CraigStatsSF: craigslist housing rental data

Grad student Ethan Garner created CraigStatsSF, a site that slices, dices, and visualizes CraigsList San Francisco housing rental listings with Google Maps overlays. For example, this heat map shows a citywide view of rental costs for one bedroom apartments over the last year.

Craigsstats

From the project description:

After living in this city for 8 years, living in a lot of horrible neighborhoods, and doing the eternal run-around to find a decent apartment I have become fascinated with the San Francisco rental market .

At the end of the August 2006, I was dealing a really shady landlord whose house was going into foreclosure as he (like a lot of the city) had speculated on an adjustable rate mortgage…and he was desperately trying his best to get as much money as he could out of me in any illegal way possible.

Not wanting to deal with such a shady landlord, I broke the lease, and fled to find a new place.

As I started looking for places, I noticed everything that used to be for rent was now for sale due to the same forclosure effect that happened to my landlord.

It also appeared that the rents were going up….. but… were the really? or am I just paranoid and bitter?

Since I was waiting to get my research published, I figured I could waste ample amounts of time coding perl scripts and learning google maps.

This project was born out of boredom.

Link (Thanks, Jason Tester!)