Neighborhood Watch

June 14, 2017 5:26 PM

Click that 'hood! is a geography game which tests your knowledge of city neighborhoods. To play Click that 'hood! you first need to select a city or town from the long list of locations available. You are then shown an interactive map of your chosen city. Your task is to correctly identify the location of twenty neighborhoods as quickly as possible by pointing them out on the map. If your town or city isn't already available to play on Click that 'hood! then you can add it yourself. If you have a shapefile of your local neighborhoods you can e-mail it to Code for America and they will add it to the game. Alternatively you can clone the game on GitHub and add the neighborhood data to your own instance of Click that 'hood. (Keir Clark/Maps Mania)
posted by Room 641-A (41 comments total)

I feel like such a rube. A bumpkin, even.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 5:59 PM on June 14, 2017

I was surprisingly bad at this for Seattle. Apparently the actual boundaries of neighborhoods are different than how people describe/use neighborhood names.

Some of the neighborhood names I haven't ever even heard of, not even in casual verbal use. Like Harrison/Denny-Blaine. Everyone (at least outside of the neighborhood) just calls that area either Madrona or Madison.
posted by loquacious at 6:48 PM on June 14, 2017 [6 favorites]

Why is the map so damn small? You try and choose a small 'hood and your finger covers four.

Also, I've lived in Toronto for 50 years--moved all over the place. Only heard of one of the neighbourhoods it offered.
posted by dobbs at 6:54 PM on June 14, 2017 [2 favorites]

some of the fine-grained distinctions between neighborhoods on the seattle map don't make any sense to me — some of those names are names I've never heard before, even though I've lived all over seattle.

I think this may be more effective in places where the boundaries between neighborhoods are fairly hard-edged — san francisco, manhattan, and so forth. neighborhood boundaries in seattle, at least as I understand them, are very blurry. It's not like there's ballard on one side of a street or a block and fremont on the other, for example. instead there's a smallish area that's definitely Ballard, a smallish area that's definitely Fremont, and then a larger, vaguer Frelard zone between them.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 6:57 PM on June 14, 2017 [3 favorites]

Well that definitely revealed a few things about me.

And also apparently the part of town I know as one neighborhood is actually, like, four. (And we need to stop it with the North/South/East/West slicing and dicing of neighborhood designations. I know we love to boast about our large number of eensy weensy neighborhoods, but come on now.)
posted by soren_lorensen at 6:58 PM on June 14, 2017

Oh wow, DC. You can tell where quite a few of the predominantly black neighborhoods are, because they're allotted a comically large and ill-defined chunk of the map with an entire region of the city standing in for individual neighborhoods, as if to say, "eh... they live somewhere over here."
posted by duffell at 7:06 PM on June 14, 2017 [7 favorites]

Why when I hover over a part of the map to click does it reveal the name? Seems to defeat the whole purpose of the game.
posted by Carillon at 7:06 PM on June 14, 2017 [2 favorites]

The DC one is... man that is something, isn't it? The Pittsburgh one is accurate but then I went to look at DC because I used to live there for a while and wut.
posted by soren_lorensen at 7:30 PM on June 14, 2017 [1 favorite]

*We’ll skip some neighborhoods since they’re too small to click.
(Nothing personal, [MY NEIGHBORHOOD].)

sad trombone

Yeah, the lack of zoom is perplexing. Many of the neighborhoods were way too small to click. I'm familiar with a lot of the names since they are city-designated neighborhoods (and not necessarily what the people who live there call them). But there are huge swaths of the city I barely ever drive through, let alone have familiarity with.
posted by AFABulous at 7:36 PM on June 14, 2017

I found LA city and county to be accurate. The only neighborhood I hadn't heard of is Hollywood Hills West. Despite living here nearly fifty years, almost everything north of the 101 and the 134 may as well be in a different city altogether, although I'd probably score ok if the map was just divided into quadrants.
posted by Room 641-A at 7:38 PM on June 14, 2017

Chicago was okay, unsurprisingly.

Grand Rapids was laughably horrible, also unsurprisingly.
posted by tivalasvegas at 7:43 PM on June 14, 2017

This is great! San Francisco is straightforward.
posted by phliar at 7:45 PM on June 14, 2017

The one that features the Canadian provinces skips Prince Edward Island (and also refers to the three territories as provinces). In other words, I got 12 out of 12 provinces correct!
posted by obscure simpsons reference at 8:23 PM on June 14, 2017

I suck at this and I've lived in Pittsburgh for almost thirty years now. To be fair, there are over a hundred neighborhoods in a city of only 300k, so a lot of them are barely more than a handful of streets, two churches and a convenience store.
posted by octothorpe at 8:31 PM on June 14, 2017 [2 favorites]

Wow! I do not know the Toronto burbs at all.
posted by bonobothegreat at 8:35 PM on June 14, 2017

Funny, I tried this with the four cities I've lived in, plus Manhattan and Brooklyn, and DC is where I did the best.

I'm fairly certain they just made up some names for Seattle neighborhoods.
posted by lunasol at 8:36 PM on June 14, 2017

This is stupidly fun.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 9:02 PM on June 14, 2017

Ha -- I didn't realize the ones I was searching for were the blacked-out ones. Once I figured that out it was (mostly) straightforward. However, knowing my city is part of a larger metro, the far sides of the map seemed like they should be the surrounding suburbs, but indeed the edge of the map was, say, 181st avenue out of 352 blocks. That may have been the hardest thing.
posted by klausman at 9:48 PM on June 14, 2017

I lived in Los Angeles for most of my life and...to my great shame...gave up half through the map.
posted by potrzebie at 10:26 PM on June 14, 2017

Ugh, I want to add Durham, NC, but all of the shapefiles are only accessible to folks with a Duke account. Can anyone help me out who has one?
posted by oceanjesse at 10:26 PM on June 14, 2017 [1 favorite]

I had to stop doing the DC one in disgust after I saw the whole chunk east of the river listed as "Anacostia." Nope, not how that works, quit getting your geography lessons from the crime write-ups in the Washington Post.
posted by ActionPopulated at 10:26 PM on June 14, 2017 [3 favorites]

Apparently the Toronto ones are based on City of Toronto's official shapefiles but I don't think anyone actually uses those names IRL... too many hyphens! And apparently Queen West and Koreatown aren't official neighbourhoods. And there's a South Parkdale, but what about the rest of it?
posted by airmail at 10:29 PM on June 14, 2017

I tried out the Dallas map because, hey, lived in Dallas for several decades. The "neighborhood" names are uninspired but I think that's a commentary on Dallas, not the map. "Click on...northwest Dallas." They managed to get Knox-Henderson, Old East Dallas, Oak Cliff, and Deep Ellum right so points for that. Their source was D Magazine, which explains why everything west of Hampton Road or north of Loop 12 is hazy.

You Can't Tip a Buick: It's not like there's ballard on one side of a street or a block and fremont on the other, for example.

All I can say is, don't let the people who live juuuust on the southern side of NW 85th hear you say that. South of 85th? Paradise on Earth. North of 85th? Lifeless hellscape. (I think a lot of old-school Ballardites would still prefer that the boundary be 65th but to do so would put Larsen's in the vast wasteland so that's a non-starter.)
posted by fireoyster at 12:56 AM on June 15, 2017 [1 favorite]

Working the election a few years back and people would say "yes, we live in $street address, desirable suburb" nah, you actually live in $street address, standard suburb. Disagreement. Nah, There doesn't exist $street in desirable suburb. oh well. Apparently the AEC got it wrong.

Realestate agents were pretty bad a few years back with advertising houses in more desirable neighbouring suburbs too.
posted by freethefeet at 3:00 AM on June 15, 2017 [2 favorites]

Also, LOL at Melbourne suburbs stopping as far in as they do- doesn't go out to Lilydale, but stops at around Kew!
posted by freethefeet at 3:03 AM on June 15, 2017 [1 favorite]

Okay, in my defense, 1) LA is so big (470 sq miles!) it's like having to play with three cities at once and 2) a lot of these far-flung places like Porter Ranch were orange groves* until fairly recently so not really places I'd necessarily know growing up.

*"Orange groves" as shorthand for before the areas were really developed.
posted by Room 641-A at 4:37 AM on June 15, 2017

Congratulations!
You correctly identified
all Europe, 1938 countries
in 1:32.0!

See, Hearts of Iron 4 teached me something :-)
posted by Pendragon at 5:23 AM on June 15, 2017 [1 favorite]

I've spent the last three days poring over a GB map trying to figure out patterns in PV solar cell adoption, which helped tremendously with UK counties, until I got to Northern Ireland.

I'm not convinced Buckinghamshire can be called a 'hood.
posted by biffa at 5:28 AM on June 15, 2017

It seems like it doesn't let you skip the ones you don't know, which is unfortunate since I don't know most of them!
posted by aka burlap at 5:49 AM on June 15, 2017

They're just trolling us with Rockville, right? Half of these are literally the names of individual apartment buildings.
posted by duffell at 6:00 AM on June 15, 2017

Also, as a born-and-raised Seattleite, their map is--if anything--conservative when it comes to neighborhood divisions. Seattleites don't even wait for developers to invent fake-ass neighborhoods, they like to do it themselves. A little disappointed Top Hat didn't make the list, honestly.
posted by duffell at 6:10 AM on June 15, 2017

I had to stop doing the DC one in disgust after I saw the whole chunk east of the river listed as "Anacostia." Nope, not how that works, quit getting your geography lessons from the crime write-ups in the Washington Post.

Everything east of the river is Anacostia, but I'm expected to know fucking "Berkley"?
posted by Bulgaroktonos at 6:38 AM on June 15, 2017 [2 favorites]

Everything east of the river is Anacostia, but I'm expected to know fucking "Berkley"?

Just came in to say almost literally this; very pleased to know the DC (and former-DC) contingent of MeFites is on it. Also Foxhall Village? What the fuck is that? But Park View gets folded into Petworth.
posted by Mrs. Pterodactyl at 8:03 AM on June 15, 2017 [1 favorite]

It's easier when you notice they show the neighborhood names on hover. Well, at least on desktop, and at least for Philadelphia.
posted by SansPoint at 8:07 AM on June 15, 2017

Apparently Dublin is just off the coast of Wales. I'm not saying the European capitals map is inaccurate but it's creative.
posted by kariebookish at 9:13 AM on June 15, 2017

The neighborhood name do show on hover on desktop in the quick mode. The hard mode does not give hints.

I tried doing the US cities one and the city markers were waaay off the map. Like SF and Boston are in the ocean.
posted by LizBoBiz at 9:17 AM on June 15, 2017

Didn't actually ask about MInneapolis/St. Paul neighborhoods. They were all suburbs, some quite far-flung. I'd like to see one that actually gets at neighborhoods within the city boundaries.
posted by Mental Wimp at 10:40 AM on June 15, 2017

The 'UK Regions' one is comedically easy.

'Locate the South West!' Click on the bit on the bottom left. 'Locate the East Midlands!' Click on the bit on the right in the middle.
posted by Urtylug at 11:00 AM on June 15, 2017 [1 favorite]

I got perfect on the Tolkien shire map, though.
posted by dobbs at 12:59 PM on June 15, 2017 [1 favorite]

In playing Seattle, I wasn't surprised to learn neighborhoods that were new to me, like Victory Heights or Windermere that weren't near places I've lived. I was much more surprised to find out that the part of the Central District where I grew up was apparently named Minor, and was bordered by Mann and Atlantic. I have never heard of any of these places; I always just said I was from the CD. (If you're not from the CD, the conversation ends there. If you are, then you get into specific details about what you were near, places you remember, etc.)

I have now lived in West Seattle long enough to have a pretty good sense of it, but was still surprised at Riverview. Wikipedia says it's part of Delridge, which I didn't realize subdivided into pieces.
posted by Margalo Epps at 8:58 PM on June 15, 2017

The Seattle one is a bit of a category error in that it's based on city clerk data rather than what people actually call places.

See for example the jargon of "Central Business District" rather than "Downtown". Or how "SoDo" is superseded by an awkward "Industrial District".

And where's Rainier Valley? Why no Squire Park? Why is Capitol Hill divided? Why is it divided into overly large Broadway and Stevens rather than (if we must divide it); I-5 shores, Pike/Pine, Broadway, North Broadway, Stevens, North Capitol Hill, Interlaken, and Hilltop?
posted by tychotesla at 11:17 PM on June 15, 2017 [2 favorites]