Trulia Hindsight: more cool stuff

**NOTE (5/30/07–10 am PT):  due to high demand on Trulia Hindsight, we are experiencing technical difficulties.  We’ll get this resolved asap - sorry for the inconvenience** 

Have you ever wished you could turn back the clock and check out how your home town developed over time?

Trulia Hindsight, a new site that we’ve developed with design firm Stamen, provides an animated map of residential properties in the US. With Trulia Hindsight, you can search for specific cities, neighborhoods, or even streets and then watch as properties appear on the map in the year they were built. A slider control allows you to see when the majority of development occurred, pause on a specific time frame or focus on only homes built before or after specific years. Truly a unique and fun way to visualize the development of cities, towns or blocks . . . be careful you may spend hours cruising around the country.

Here are some examples to give you a taste:

Las Vegas, NV

Watch as Las Vegas transforms from a barren, desert city into a booming metropolis. The first boom, in the early 1930s, accompanied the construction of the Hoover Dam, which brought an influx of construction workers to the Valley. As corporations began to invest in hotel and casino properties in the 1960’s gambling became “gaming,” making the transition into a legitimate business and bringing a three-decade-long wave of growth to Las Vegas. Starting in the mid-1980s, Las Vegas’ population began to grow by 7 percent per year, causing the city’s population to nearly double between 1985 and 1995 to 368,360. As the Trulia Hindsight timeline moves forward through the decades, housing developments mushroom before your eyes on the vast tracts of land surrounding what is today the glittering Las Vegas
strip.

Levittown, NY
Another dramatic example is the construction of Levittown, New York, a planned community originally conceived as a housing development for returning World War II veterans. Watch the Trulia Hindsight map light up between 1947 and 1951, when builders Levitt and Sons, Inc. mass-produced 17,447 homes on what had once been potato farms on Long Island. Their most popular model, a ranch built on a concrete slab, measured 32’ by 25’ and sold for $7,990. All a prospective buyer needed was a $90 deposit and payments of $58 per month.

Los Angeles, CA

The growth of Los Angeles began with the completion of the Southern Pacific railroad in 1876, the discovery of oil in 1892 and the construction of the first Los Angeles aqueduct ion 1913. A wave of housing construction occurred in the 1920s, with the arrival of the motion picture and aviation industries. In1923, the Hollywood sign, which originally reads “Hollywoodland,” was erected as an advertisement for a Hollywood Hills housing development. After World War II, the aerospace and defense industries brought hundreds of new residents into the county each day. In 1949, developers purchased 3,375 acres of farmland in Southeast Los Angeles County and, over the next five years, laid out 133 miles of streets and erected 17,500 homes in assembly-line fashion. By the 1950s the sprawling metropolis of Los Angeles County was considered the epitome of modern life, with its snaking system of super highways, affordable housing and promise of opportunity. Trulia Hindsight offers a bird’s eye view of the swelling metropolis that today encompasses 4, 084 square miles.

Aspen, CO

Just 700 people called Aspen, Colorado home in 1935, when international outdoorsmen came to the Roaring Fork Valley in search of the ideal location for a ski resort. In1947, Aspen Mountain opened with the world’s longest ski lift. In 1950, Aspen became the first ski resort in America to host an international competition, precursor of today’s World Cup Races. With the opening of three more mountains—Buttermilk (1958), Aspen Highlands (1958), and Snowmass (1968), housing developments blossomed in Aspen and the surrounding valleys as the modest silver mining town transformed into a premiere international resort.

Now go ahead, search for your own city, zoom in to specific neighborhoods and watch the building begin! Have a good story to tell? Let us know and we’ll post it on the Trulia Hindsight blog.

Sources for this post include: Wikipedia, Aspen Historical Society (Aspenhistory.org), City of Las Vegas website (LasVegasNevada.gov), & Los Angeles County information (LACounty.info).