No black box. Every percentage is built from factors you chose, weighted the way you set them, measured against real data — and you can open any score to see exactly what drove it.
The insight behind Austin’s Almanac: a place is a stack. Where you live inherits its town, which inherits its state, which inherits its metro economy.
Median rent, income, schools, violent-crime rate, walkability, who lives here — the block-level texture that changes street to street. Drill into census tracts and this is the layer that keeps getting finer.
Abortion access, LGBTQ protections, cannabis, guns, the death penalty, in-state college costs. Identical for every town in the state — and they flip the instant you cross the line, which is why two neighboring suburbs can score very differently.
Unemployment, job growth, median wages, FEMA climate-disaster risk — the tide that lifts or sinks every town in the region, on either side of the state line.
Mark each factor Off / Low / Med / High. Must-haves are hard filters, not extra weight.
Each place's data is scaled against the range of its peers so factors compare fairly.
Budget, family, workplace and amenities are measured in real miles and dollars.
Open "why 79%?" on any place for the point-by-point breakdown.
We build on free, commercially-usable public sources — U.S. Census / ACS, the Tax Foundation, FEMA's National Risk Index, DPIC, state statutes, and OpenStreetMap. College data (College Scorecard) is limited today and being expanded, not yet nationwide. Every factor names its source so you can check it.
Attributions. Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database License (ODbL); basemap tiles © CARTO. This product includes information from the O*NET Database by the U.S. Department of Labor, Employment and Training Administration (USDOL/ETA), used under the CC BY 4.0 license — Austin’s Almanac has modified some of this information; USDOL/ETA has not approved, endorsed, or tested these modifications. Occupational-license data: USDOL/ETA and the Analyst Resource Center at Minnesota DEED (CareerOneStop License Finder).
Some block-level texture is modeled from the town's real figures while we finish wiring live tract data, and commute times are estimates until routed. We label estimates as estimates — a fit score should never pretend to be more certain than it is.