Understand & use it
This is a short field guide to Find Your Happy Place — what it is, what kinds of questions it can answer, and how to read each of its four views so you get real answers out of them. No data background needed. If you'd rather just poke at it, jump straight to the dials →; if you want the engineering story instead, that lives in how it was built →.
What this is
Where would you be happiest living in the US? It depends entirely on what you value — a low cost of living, a strong job market, room to breathe, a place where your dollar actually stretches. Most people never get to ask that question with real numbers behind it.
Gazetteer is a tool for asking it. It pulls together dozens of free, public US datasets — cost of living, income, home values, jobs, population, migration — and lines them up for the same place and the same time, so you can compare places on the things you care about. Think of it less as a report and more as a data toy: type in your county, compare it to a friend's, slide a few dials, and immediately get something — "oh, my dollar goes 30% further over there."
Two ideas are worth holding onto, because they shape everything else:
- It hands you ingredients, never a verdict. The tool will never tell you the "best place to live." There's no hidden score deciding for you. Instead it lays out each measure honestly and gives you the controls to weigh them by what you think matters. You decide what "happy" means; it just makes the comparison legible. (This is a deliberate design stance, not a missing feature — the reasoning behind it is part of how it was built.)
- It's about exploring, not predicting your life. The data is "good as of the last public release" — annual or monthly, not live. That's on purpose: this is an exploratory tool for understanding place, not a real-time service. A figure being a year or two old is normal here, and the tool always shows you which year each number comes from.
The two words that unlock every view: percentile and cost-adjusted. A percentile is just a place's national rank for one measure, from 0% (the lowest county in the country) to 100% (the highest). "75th percentile income" means higher income than 75% of counties — a quick way to compare a measure across very different places. Cost-adjusted (or "real") income means income after accounting for how expensive the place is — what your money actually buys there, not just the number on the paycheck. These two concepts come up on every page below.
What it can answer
The tool is built around a handful of real questions. Here are the ones it answers best, and which view to reach for:
- "Where would I, specifically, be happiest?" Pick the things you value and watch the whole country re-rank to fit your priorities. → Find your happy place
- "Where does this one thing look best across the country?" See income, or home values, or jobs, painted across the whole map — one measure at a time. → Explore the map
- "Where would my income go furthest?" Put in your home county and your income, and see where the same dollar stretches further than it does at home. → Where does your income go furthest?
- "How do these two specific places stack up?" Put two counties head-to-head and read every measure side by side — including a peek at where housing affordability might be heading. → Compare two places
A few honest things the tool will not do, so you know what you're holding: it won't hand you a single "best place" ranking, it won't promise the future, and it won't pretend to have data it doesn't. Where a number is genuinely missing, you'll see a blank — blank means "honestly unknown," never zero, and a place is never pushed to the bottom of a list just because part of its picture is missing.
How to read each view
Four views, four jobs. Each one below: what you do · what it shows · how to read it.
🎚️ Find your happy place — open it →
What you do. Turn five dials to say what you value: cheaper housing, higher real income, cheaper homes to buy, a stronger job market, more people moving in. Drag any dial to zero to drop that measure from the mix entirely.
What it shows. A US map and a top-25 list that re-rank live as you move the dials — your priorities, your map.
How to read it. Each county's score is a plain weighted average of the
measures' national percentiles — no black box. Every dial is oriented so that
turning it up always pushes toward "better" (for things like home prices and
unemployment, where lower is good, the tool quietly flips the math for you). On
the map, darker green = a better fit for what you chose, where 0% is the
worst fit and 100% is the best. Each county also shows "scored on N of M" — how
many of your chosen measures it actually has data for — so you can tell a strong
fit from a thinly-measured one. This is the view where the "ingredients, not a
verdict" idea is most visible: change a dial and watch which places rise.
🗺️ Explore the map — open it →
What you do. Pick a single measure from a dropdown — affordability, income, home value, population, migration, or jobs — and the whole country re-shades to it.
What it shows. One measure painted across every county, plus the top-10 and bottom-10 counties for it.
How to read it. Darker green = better for the measure you picked — and the tool keeps that promise even for measures where a lower number is good (housing affordability, unemployment), by reversing the color ramp so green always means "good place to be." Hover any county for its stat card. Each measure shows its own latest available year, so you're always seeing the freshest figure for that particular thing. The %ile column is that county's national percentile for the measure — the same 0–100 rank from above.
🧭 Where does your income go furthest? — open it →
What you do. Pick your home county and enter your income. Every other county is then re-expressed relative to you.
What it shows. A map colored by surplus — how much further (or less far) your dollar would go in each place compared to home. Green = further, red = less far, near-white = about the same as home.
How to read it. Two columns sit side by side, and reading them together is the whole point. "Your dollar goes further by" is pure purchasing power — cost-adjusted, the mission's core idea. "Affordability %ile" is how affordable a place actually is for a typical household. They can disagree: a pricey metro can look like great "value" for a dollar yet still be out of reach for most people, so affordability is shown alongside the surplus, never folded into it, exactly so you can catch that. One thing that surprises people: sliding your income does not re-order the map. Your dollar's relative stretch doesn't depend on how many dollars you have — so the income slider instead moves "equivalent income," the salary you'd need in each place to keep your home standard of living. (If the tool has no cost-of-living figure for your home county, it'll say so and ask you to pick another — it needs a home anchor to measure everywhere else against.)
📊 Compare two places — open it →
What you do. Pick two counties and put them head-to-head.
What it shows. A short Wikipedia intro for each place (so a profile reads like a place, not just a column of numbers), then every measure side by side — the raw number and its national percentile — a cost-adjusted-income headline, a housing-affordability trend with a short forecast, and a net-migration trend.
How to read it. Read the raw value and the %ile together: the number tells you "how much," the percentile tells you "compared to the rest of the country." As everywhere, higher isn't automatically better — a high unemployment percentile means more unemployment. Two charts add the time dimension: net migration shows whether a place is gaining people (above the zero line) or losing them (below it), and the affordability chart shows measured history as a solid line with a shaded cone on the last two years — that cone is a genuine forecast with error bars, deliberately drawn wide where the tool is less sure. Treat the cone as a measured guess, never a promise; this is the one predictive corner of the tool, and it's kept honest on purpose. (How that forecast is built and graded is covered in how it was built.)
Where to go next
- Just want to play? Start with find your happy place — it's the most fun first click.
- Want a specific answer? Use the map for one measure, relocate for "where my dollar goes furthest," or compare for two places head-to-head.
- Curious how it's built? The architecture, the data model, the design decisions, and the (honest) predictive-modeling experiment are all in how it was built →.