In order to get the most of a new home, you should start by researching neighborhoods and the opportunities they provide. Unfortunately, most of us skip this critical step and start looking for apartments or homes in neighborhoods we happen to be familiar with.  

When compared to the way we search for nearly every other product or service online, seaching for a neighborhood is severly limited despite incredibly advances in technology. There is now a wealth of data available about neighborhoods and the opportunities that they provide, such as schools, civic spaces, farmers' markets, grocery stores, etc - but very little of it is searchable as it should be: oriented around opportunity, presented on a map, and accessible to a wide audience.

Compounding things, by looking only in neighborhoods we're already familiar with, neighborhoods that in many cases are not very diverse, we unintentionally maintain residential segregation. New research finds that most of us have only looked for housing in neighborhoods in which our own race or ethnicity is already in the majority, despite the fact that research also shows that most of us want to live in neighborhoods that are more diverse.

MoveSmart.org is designed to solve these two problems.

To help you find neighborhoods with the specific opportunities or features you need to be successful, we aggregate and crunch large and complex data sets to create a custom neighborhood index and interactive maps. And to ensure that you'll discover new and exciting neighborhoods, we reorder the list of results to promote neighborhoods you've likely never heard of, diverse  neighborhoods that are a great fit for your needs.

And because we know that no neighborhood is perfect and that we all have to make decisions about what we need versus what we want, MoveSmart.org limits you to choosing three priorities in a neighborhood. Every neighborhood has opportunties and challenges, the trick is finding the right combination for you. Change your mind or want to just try out a different search? You can always swap things around, and soon you'll be able to save and share your favorite neighborhoods.

Americans are among the most mobile people on earth; we move constantly. MoveSmart.org believes this is an amazing opportunity to transform our communities and lives. By simply changing how we search for housing to first finding and providing connections to opportunity, it is possible to build exciting, efficient, and diverse neighborhoods. We can and should all love where we live.   


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There is a big challenge to our approach: the availability of data in specific formats and under specific licensing agreements. That is why the MoveSmart.org team is proud to be part of and committed to working with an emerging sector of technologists, developers, and government employees in opening government data to the public. Want to learn more? GovFresh.com is a great place to start.  

Curious about the research behind MoveSmart.org? Read this page on Search and Diversity.