Taking a look at Bolinas, CA in Hindsight you’d be forgiven for thinking there was something wrong with our data. There’s a steady growth up until 1971 and then suddenly: nothing.

Thankfully, this article Controlling Growth by Controlling Water from the New York Times of October 2005 explains:

The same urge to remain pristine has led to one of the most extreme anti-growth policies in the nation. For more than 30 years, Bolinas has refused to authorize a single new water meter, needed for hooking up to the town water supply. There are now 580 meters - the same as in November 1971, when the moratorium began.

I wonder if Bolinas is unique, or if there are other communities that have limited growth in similarly inventive ways?

Sometimes the constraints on expansion give rise to the most interesting patterns. From Wikipedia’s article on Madison,

Madison was created in 1836 when former federal judge James Duane Doty purchased over a thousand acres (4 km²) of swamp and forest land on the isthmus between Lakes Mendota and Monona within the Four Lakes region with the intention of building a new city on the site.

You can see the beginnings of the developments from around 1850 quite clearly on Hindsight, both around the area between the lakes and then further out expanding West and Northeast. After inital expansion after founding the city, you can clearly see that development continued along lines defined by the isthmus. Fascinating stuff!

Even though we look at these kinds of maps and data visualizations every day, Hindsight is prompting us to look closer. On purely aesthetic grounds, this animation of properties northeast of Reno is one of our favorites. A little further north though, you can see that the assessor database Trulia has is a little bit behind Microsoft’s aerial imagery for the same area.

But then if you zoom out again, you can see the satellite imagery at that level is older than the data we’re drawing. This is one of the side-effects of this kind of visualization: it’s always a work in progress where the edges and seams between the different datasets are often the most interesting parts.

CHS: Capitol Hill Seattle (“Tales from the fancy pants part of Seattle’s Capitol Hill”) has a great theory about growth in Seattle around the turn of the last century:

“You can see that most homes in our neighborhood came into existence prior to 1930 with a big spike in 1906 — that’s the same year as the legendary San Francisco earthquake, of course, so it seems like Seattle may have benefited from the destruction to the south. It’s also interesting to note where most of the area development has occurred post-1950 — you only find the more-recent blue and purple dots down the hill off Madison for the most part with a few scattered here and there between this part of the hill and Broadway.”

Correlation or causation? Does anyone know more about the relationship between the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 and growth in construction rates in Seattle around the same time?

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. In 1947, 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.

See the website of the Aspen Historical Society for more details.

We’ve been really excited by the response to Hindsight so far, especially from blogs like This is LaVergne, TN. It’s a blog “dedicated to keeping our community updated on current events, and serves as a guide for restaurants, entertainment, schools, and more.” - exactly the kind of thing blogs are made for!

Kathy T from This is LaVergne wrote:

I was poking around online and stumbled upon this neato online toy that shows what housing growth has been from 1890 to the present. It shows LaVergne being fairly quiet until the mid 1990’s and exploding in the 2000’s. Want to take a peek? Go here!

We’re really thrilled to see folks like Kathy T taking the time to send links around mailing lists, forums and blogs. I’ve just made a blogs category so we can return the enthusiasm and highlight the most interesting things people have linked to so far.

In the meantime, here’s a short video demonstrating the site that we used in a presentation we gave at the Where 2.0 conference in San Jose yesterday

Trulia Hindsight Demo from Stamen on Vimeo

You can also download the full resolution clip, a 1024×768 resolution Quicktime movie, approximately 17MB.

To date over 48 billion dollars of wealth has been unearthed from this hill. This extraordinary phenomenon emerged at the height of the industrial revolution when the mining hill became the most concentrated area of industrial machines on Earth. The colossal machines spawned the most influential labor market anywhere, the most ethnically diverse population in the country, the largest red light district in the American West, nine railroads, the largest network of underground workings per square mile in the world (over 10,000 miles of tunneling), more wealth per citizen than any other comparable place up to that time, and a titanic struggle for the hill’s riches by both entrepreneurs and laborers.

from Western Mining History

Real Estate Boom
The first real estate boom started in 1896 with the arrival of the railroad. In the 1920s a real estate boom changed the area as new subdivisions and tourist resorts were built. In 1926, a major hurricane hit Miami and building was halted by the stock market crash and the Great Depression. On August 24, 1992 one of the country’s worst disasters caused more than $20 billion in damage when Hurrican Andrew hit Miami-Date County.