Decision tools

Every decision tool on this site is built into the data pages themselves: a match engine that ranks 12 Houston-area communities, 66 side-by-side comparisons, and commute, flood, school-district and walkability figures on each community page.

Neighborhood match engine →

Answer questions about your work location, budget, housing plan and risk tolerance. Returns ranked matches with the score for each dimension shown, so you can see why something ranked where it did.

66 side-by-side comparisons →

Any two communities against the same Census tables, the same FEMA flood map, and the same list of 17 employer campuses, including which of the two is closer to each one.

Commute, flood, schools and walkability by community →

Each community page carries estimated commute time to all 17 campuses, its FEMA flood designation, its school district and that district's TEA rating with the campus-grade spread, and its EPA walkability range. Every figure links its source.

What is missing, and why

There is no true monthly housing-cost calculator, and that is a data problem rather than a scheduling one. Municipal Utility District taxes are a real layer on top of county, city and school-district rates, and the load is parcel-level, so a cost figure without them would mislead. Texas publishes MUD tax rates and MUD boundaries in two separate systems whose identifiers do not correspond, which would leave matching them by district name; with districts named things like "Harris County MUD #1" and "#11", one wrong digit is a different tax rate. We would rather publish nothing than a number you might budget against. Until a reliable link between those two datasets exists, check the property's tax bill and the relevant county appraisal district directly.