An outsider's neighborhood guide to Los Angeles

If you loved your old neighborhood back in New York, or Chicago, can a website help you find a similar kind of place in Los Angeles? I am doubtful, but the website Homethinking is trying to do the job.

The website uses census data to analyze demographic characteristics of a neighborhood, and to find similar neighborhoods in other cities. So if you're familiar with New York City neighborhoods, and want to find their Los Angeles demographic equivalents, you would find that:

SoHo is like: Pico/Robertson and Silver Lake;
Little Italy is like: Atwater Village and Leimert Park;
Chelsea is like: Mid City West, Los Feliz and Hollywood Hills.

Somewhat amusing, but I'm not sure there is much value there -- the "Chelsea is like" example failed to come up with West Hollywood, probably because West Hollywood is not in the city of Los Angeles. The site lists only neighborhoods in the city of L.A.

I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on this site, which has a few other bells and whistles, and is mainly devoted to helping readers pick the right real estate agent.

-- Peter Viles

Photo: Searching for a neighborhood at the Grove shopping center. Credit: Los Angeles Times

Comments

[mike]

BUNCH OF B.S.

[Drew]

To be used for entertainment purposes only.

I can't for the life of me figure out how they made these comparisons.

[KateNonymous]

Apparently Palms is like a group of neighborhoods that (a) are not really like Palms and (b) are not like each other, either. This is an odd site.

[Cassiopoea]

Uh... no. How do they reach these conclusions? I don't think that one can really compare New York to Los Angeles.

[glassine]

i've lived in both cities. this is such absolute nonsense that it's not even funny. chelsea = los feliz? based on the demographics? BS.

[Encinoman]

Absurd. And New Yorkers don't live in Sherman Oaks, Encino, Tarzana, Fairfax, etc? No comparisons to Long Island/New Jersey/Westchester suburbs is here either; in Manhattan you don't get lawns, pools, garages, etc.

[John Ellison]

Whoever's at Homethinking must be idots. Either that or they never lived in NYC or LA. I've lived in both & with the comparisons I just read are a joke.

Apples & oranges. You just can't compare the 2 in terms of living & actually be accurate. But some people believe anything they read hahaha

[Uncle Billy Goes Public]

Apropos choosing a real estate agent, Heard an NAR ad on the radio today telling us that commercial real estate is doing just dandy. And that if we want to buy a commercial property we should call a member of the NAR.
Good grief -- many residential agents that weren't doing too well 10 years ago began to try to sell commercial property. This I think was catalyzed by the emergence of loopnet.com, and a host of lesser sites, which opened up much previously closely held information.

[Niki Scevak]

Cheers Peter. You are absolutely right in that we should have West Hollywood, Beverly Hills etc as part of LA.

We are a small team and used an existing taxonomy from Zillow and Urban Mapping. We are planning our next release around allowing users to ad, merge and delete neighborhoods in cities.

That said, in terms of how the scores work and what they compare, it's mainly to do with young vs old people, households who have kids vs one without kids, income and also whether people tend to be single, divorced or married in the neighborhood.

Also, the problem with launching a review site is that there are no reviews to begin with. So although the algorithm generates the initial matches, the scores are refined over time by people's reviews. So to a few of the commenters be sure to write reviews.

[xtine]

There seem to be 3 LA neighborhoods that are like every Manhattan neighborhood.

Having lived in both - I agree with the other commenters - this is all a hot pile of crapola.

[david]

East Village is like Palms ?! LOL!

[TrojanDLA]

Next, we'll compare Miami Beach to Honolulu! How about San Diego to Chicago? Atlanta to Denver?

The potential is limitless!