More real estate heat maps, including Boston

I mentioned Zillow’s real estate heat maps here several weeks ago: Zillow calculates and then maps the cost per square foot of houses in Seattle and San Francisco. Well
they’re back, and this time they brought friends. Now they’ve added New York and Boston and some other cities to the list.

Mostly something like this tells you what you already know: beach front property in San Diego is expensive, Brooklyn is cheaper than Manhattan and so on. But this is real data, and there are some things to learn. I had no idea, for instance, that Phoenix had such brutal wealth gradients. I have to bet that Scottsdale is loaded with gated communities, because that peaky cost distribution is a recipe for trouble. It’s nice that they use an absolute color scale for “heat,” because it lets you take in at a glance how absurdly expensive Silicon Valley is compared to the rest of the country.