Earlier this week, Google greatly expanded the areas covered by its Street View feature. The expansion means street views in areas way outside of Houston and its surrounding areas are now viewable from within Google Maps. In fact, Google’s new coverage map indicates that pretty much all of Texas (or at least areas near its major roads and highways) now has navigable street images available, excepting a few patches here and there and a couple of wide swaths of land near El Paso.
What about the rest of the country? Oh, there’s some expanded coverage out there too:
Having trouble finding photos of your Iked house on Flickr? Try finding it from the air, using NOAA’s brand-new aerial photos, taken only a few days after Hurricane Ike.
Here’s a tool likely to be useful to armchair developers interested in the lay of the land. PolicyMap is a new GIS website that allows you to view a range of local market and demographic data for Houston or any area of the country. You can see how local crime statistics, an interesting array of mortgage categories (such as the percentage of piggyback, subprime, and refi loans), income distributions, and even donations to presidential candidates look on a map. (Big surprise: Pearland and the Energy Corridor really like John McCain!)
PolicyMap is a project of The Reinvestment Fund, a non-profit community-development financial institution from Philadelphia. Some of the advanced features require a subscription, but there’s plenty to play around with for free.
The quick map above shows what Houston areas took out the most subprime loans in 2006. (The darkest purple means more than 50% of all mortgages funded that year.) If you discover more interesting neighborhood stories demonstrated nicely in PolicyMap maps, share your finds in the comments.
Google has just added street-level photos to the driving directions available on Google Maps. This means — if you’re headed through an area covered by Google’s Street View — you can now use photographs of each intersection to guide your journey, with helpful arrows superimposed to show your path.
Though the areas covered by Street View in Houston were recently expanded, most inside-the-Loop neighborhoods are still not covered. Let’s say you’re at the new Pagoda Vietnamese restaurant near Cottage Grove, trying to find your way to Chinatown — you know, that neighborhood on Bellaire in southwest Houston, where all those Vietnamese restaurants are. If you plot your trip using Google maps, the directions won’t show photos of your first few turns. From I-10 on, though, you get preview photographs of every intersection. And you can pan and zoom around them, as if looking for oncoming traffic.
After the jump: A video from Google, showing how Street View directions work . . . and what they’re good for.
Microsoft has updated its Live Search Maps with a number of new features, the most striking of which is the ability to view a street-map overlay on the maps’ signature 3D aerial views. This should be especially helpful to the armchair pilots among you who have been flying blind through Microsoft’s “bird’s eye” views, trying to figure which street is which as you rotate around a property.
Since HAR’s recent update, Live Search Maps are now linked directly to property listings. However, those maps do not include the new street-highlighting feature. To see this new feature, go to maps.live.com and enter an address, then click on the “Bird’s eye” button at the top. Street highlighting automatically appears, but you can turn it off by clicking on the button at the top marked “Labels.” As before, you can rotate the direction of your view by clicking on the N, S, E, or W in the top left corner.
Now here’s a problem: What happens when the newly highlighted streets run behind a tall building? As our sample image above shows, they don’t just run — they dash!
The revamped HAR consumer site debuted with a splash on Valentines Day — and Houston real estate will never be the same! Over the past week, a few site quirks have quietly been ironed out (tabbed browsing now works again, for example), but there are plenty still left to enjoy. Below is Swamplot’s handy guide to some of the freakiest new HAR features — sure to excite thousands of obsessive online Real Estate voyeurs:
Another week, another round of updates to Google Maps. Sure, there are some fun new capabilities — groups of people can now work together to add items to a single personalized map; thumbnail preview photos of Street View panoramas will now appear in the pop-up balloons for many commercial addresses on major streets. But for Houston, the most exciting new feature is the new Terrain view, which now reveals even to casual internet visitors the exciting topography that makes our local landscape so . . . Houston-like.
Imagine you’re a Houston newcomer scouting hilltop locations to site your dreamhouse, and want to see what views you might get from a promontory in say, Highland Heights. Simply type in a Highland Heights address into Google Maps — try 1042 Lucky St. 77088 from today’s Daily Demolition Report, for example. Sure, aerial views have been available for a while now, but what if you want to get an idea of the views from this location? Will there be a charming vista to the Cemetery Beautiful Cemetery a few blocks to the north?
With the new Terrain view, Google lets you see: At the top right of every Google map there’s now a button labeled “Terrain.” Click that and the map you’re viewing will show all the hills and level changes in the area — all of them!
Having trouble seeing those elevation differences? Hmmm . . . well, at least it makes those bayous and gullies stand out!
Real estate agents and other obsessive users of online maps will be interested to hear about a new feature introduced very recently to Google Maps, which allows you to “correct” the location indicated for a home address. As of a few days ago, the little balloons that appear above flagged locations on a map now include an “Edit” link. Clicking on that link (and signing in to Google, if you aren’t logged in already) allows you to drag a location marker to the exact front entrance of the property, and to have the corrected location appear to other users, too. You’ll need to have an account with Google to participate. The video above illustrates how it works.
Most users will probably want to adjust the marker for their own homes, and correct frustrating Google Map errors they’ve found in other locations. (The feature will likely eventually lead to a corrected map location for 14715 Quail Grove Ln. 77079, for example.)
Of course, the potential for mischief is obvious, but Google will be using a few techniques to prevent houses from sliding all over the map: First, address-marker moves of more than 200 feet won’t show up until they are approved by a moderator — and you can imagine moderators will not have very finely developed senses of humor. Google will also be relying on crowdsourcing — in this instance relying on the presumption that a plurality of online housemovers focusing on a particular address will be making changes that are actually helpful.
All of which means that if for some reason you really do want to move a house to a new location down the street, into a new neighborhood, or to another city entirely, the online world isn’t going to be so different from the offline one: You’ll need some help from friends.
Google has just added its Street View feature to Houston Google Maps. This means that you too can experience what it’s like to drive around parts of this city with a 360-degree camera mounted to the top of your Chevy Cobalt—all from the privacy of your own computer.
Google first rolled out Street View in May for the San Francisco Bay Area, New York, Las Vegas, Denver and Miami. Severalwebsites have sprung up to documentinterestingstreetlife recorded by Google’s cameras.
For Houston, of course, Street View is much more exciting: at last, online photos of all your favorite stripcenters, parking lots, and freeways. Occasionally a pedestrian gets in the way to mar a view, but most of the shots are muchcleaner.
Swamplot covers real estate, home design and renovation, architecture, and the landscape of Houston, Texas. Swamplot did not flood during Allison — or Ike! Honest! Read more
