Many apartment hunters value walkability when looking for a new place to call home. But if you're not familiar with an area, it can be cumbersome to visit several individual neighborhoods to learn whether food stores, coffee shops, and other amenities are located within walking distance.
Walk Score, a company with a mission "to promote walkable neighborhoods," helps apartment hunters learn how walker-friendly a particular apartment building is at no charge via its Web site.
Here's how it works:
Find Apartments Based on Walk Score
If you're looking for a rental where getting a cup of coffee, buying groceries, meeting a friend out for dinner and the like are just a short walk from home, factor an apartment's Walk Score into your apartment search.
Walk Score uses an algorithm that awards points based on the distance to amenities in categories such as restaurants, groceries, shopping, coffee shops, schools, bars, public transportation and more. Amenities located over a mile away from a location don't get points. The result is a 0-100 point system in which a higher score means a more walkable area. Note that Walk Score aims to measure "how easy it is to live a car-lite lifestyle—not how pretty the area is for walking," according to the site.
There are two ways to factor walkability into your apartment search:
- Type in full or partial address to get Walk Score. Type in the address of a listing, or just the name of a town and state (or ZIP code) to get the Walk Score. Before you begin, you might want to test it out by typing in former addresses of yours and friends' and family members' addresses to see the difference in Walk Score. I tried this with several addresses and I found the results to be quite accurate.
After you get your Walk Score, you can remove amenities that don't interest you, such as Shopping or Restaurants, from the equation or you can add additional ones, such as Fitness, Hospitals or even your own amenity category (try adding "Movie Theaters," for example). - Filter results by Walk Score. Another way to get a Walk Score is to first search for apartments (utilizing current data from Craigslist.org), then filter the results by Walk Score. Walk Score values range from 0 to 100, with 0-24 ("Car-Dependent") meaning that almost all errands require driving to the other extreme, 90-100 ("Walker's Paradise"), where driving isn't needed for daily errands. (Get a full explanation of Walk Score ranges here.)
