Where Should I Live?

In practice, where we live is determined by a handful of banal realities: where we grew up, where our job is based, where our kids go to school, or where we bought a house back when they were handing out mortgages at 2.75%.

But it's fun to dream, and where we want to live can be driven by almost anything: Where are homes cheap? Where are schools good? Where is the air clean, the crime low, and the Costco nearby?

Fortunately, we at Thesis Driven have built a uesful app to help you figure out exactly that. It's called Where Should I Live, and you can select from almost 30 weighted filters to find the place that's right for you.

A handful of those filters include:

• Average home price
• Median income
• Average monthly rent
• State & local tax burden
• Summer & winter temperatures
• Snowfall
• Humidity
• Political landscape
• Crime
• Poverty
• School quality
• Distance to various things including a Costco, a major hospital, and a major airport

All filter settings save in a URL hash, so if you'd like to share your results you can simply copy-paste the URL and drop it into a text or email. There are also handy links to Zillow listings for each county, so you can see what's on the market.

While this was primarily designed as a fun consumer app, perhaps some adventurous real estate developers will find it useful for finding their next destination project.

I built this entirely in Claude Code over the past few weeks of nights and weekends. It has been about 15 years since I've built a piece of software so it was fun to get back into it, if one considers vibecoding "getting back into it."

Let me know what you think! Hopefully this is the first of many little apps we'll roll out this year.

-Brad Hargreaves