Williamsburg Project: Neighborhoods by Craig's List

If you’ve looked for an apartment in Brooklyn before – or anywhere else, I imagine – you’ve probably noticed the “fuzzy” neighborhood designations that seem to get attached to Craig’s List posts. Neighborhood definitions, which are often fought over in NYC, are of course subjective and usually decided by agencies and owners trying to rent out apartments. However, when a particular neighborhood “brand” becomes popular, apartment listers tend to take huge liberties in deciding where to place the reasonable, descriptive boundaries of the residential area.

In the past decade, it seems like there’s been no hotter Brooklyn real-estate frenzy than that which took place over Williamsburg. In an effort to illustrate all this, I’ve written a little application which maps Craig’s List apartment searches in north Brooklyn. It makes three separate requests: one for Williamsburg apartments excluding the adjacent neighborhoods of Bushwick and Bedford-Stuyvesant, and another for each of those excluding Williamsburg.

The resulting pages are scraped using Ruby’s hpricot, a new favorite of mine, for the Google Maps links at the bottom. The query strings from those URLs are then passed to the Google Geocoding API which turns them into longitude and latitude values that can be mapped with a little bit of JavaScript. The whole thing updates every evening. Enjoy!