After the last post, which looked at housing values across New York City, I thought it would be interesting to take a more granular look at housing values across the U.S.

To create the map below, I took the total residential property value for every county in the U.S. (the contiguous 48 states), and substituted those values for each county’s land area.

Total housing value by county

Aside from the Northeast, Property value in the U.S. is concentrated in a relatively small number of areas. In the animation below, notice what a small portion of the U.S. land area is actually covered by the red counties.

Update: The total residential property values shown here are a function of many factors: population density, home size, price per square foot. For a similar map that looks just at the value of housing, see: Mapping America’s Hottest Housing Markets.

Attribution

Here is the previous post on New York City property values, which explains how the values were calculated (on a related topic, here is why the rent is so high in NYC). All other county-level property values are from this post on The Economist.

This type of map, in which each area is substituted by some other mapping variable, is called a cartogram. They are not used all that often because there can be a fair amount of manual work involved in making the areas accurately sized while maintaining the basic shape.

For this map, most of the work was done using Carto3F (documentation).

Scapetoad is another great tool for making cartograms. It is not as customizable, but it is much more user-friendly.

My latest project, Elementus, aims to bring transparency to the cryptocurrency market. Check out our blog for some crypto-related data visualizations.

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