Every number,
and what it
cannot tell you.
Every figure on PickYourPlace traces to a public Canadian source and the method that produced it is published. That is the part most tools skip, and it is the only reason a score is worth anything.
Four rungs between a public record and a sentence about your life.
Most of the arguing about neighbourhood data happens because nobody says which rung they are standing on. Each one below adds something and gives something up, and the giving up is stated.
- 01
Observed record
A thing some public body wrote down: an assessed value on a parcel, a reported incident, a census response, a transit stop, a mapped flood extent. We do not create these and we do not adjust them.
What it cannot tell you. What was recorded, not what happened. Crime has to be reported to be counted, and assessments are set on a cycle rather than on the day you look.
- 02
Calculated metric
The record turned into something comparable: incidents per resident, travel time to the places you named, count of schools within a distance, share of dwellings exposed to a hazard. This is where routing, population weighting and dissemination-area aggregation happen.
What it cannot tell you. It is a model of the thing, not the thing. A routed commute is a good estimate of a journey, not a stopwatch, and an area figure is not your street.
- 03
Percentile
The metric ranked against every other neighbourhood in the same city, which is what makes a number readable at all. 80 means it sits above four fifths of that city.
What it cannot tell you. It is a rank inside one city and nothing more. It does not transfer between cities, and a high rank in a city with a real problem is still a real problem.
- 04
Interpretation
The sentence you read: how a place scores against the priorities you set, what it does well and what it asks you to trade away. A deterministic engine decides this; the language model only writes it down.
What it cannot tell you. It is an argument, not a verdict. It weighs what you told us matters, so a different answer from you produces a different ranking, and it never decides whether the trade-off is worth it.
Property Value
Municipal assessed values and how they have moved over time. Assessed values track relative patterns well, but they are not sale prices, not appraisals, and they lag the market.
Toronto is different. Ontario per-parcel assessments are licensed and not in our database, so Toronto values are modelled from Statistics Canada 2021 census dissemination-area medians, indexed forward. They are not assessments, there is no Toronto growth series, and they should not be set beside an Alberta or BC assessment as a like-for-like number.
Safety
20+ years of crime statistics directly from Calgary Police Service, Vancouver Police Department, Edmonton Police Service, and Toronto Police Service, analyzed by category with year-over-year trends, not anecdotal "it feels unsafe" opinions.
Access
What is actually within reach on foot, by transit and by car: schools, transit stops, groceries, parks and healthcare. Travel times are routed on the real network, which is a model of the journey, not a stopwatch.
Community context
Statistics Canada data showing who actually lives in each neighbourhood, income, family size, education, language, and community composition.
Climate & Hazards
Geospatial overlays of physical risk, see at a glance which hazards a property is exposed to before you fall in love with it.
See this data applied to your move.
Tell us what matters and every source above gets weighed against it. No account needed, and no credit card.
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