How every score
is measured.
Every number on PickYourPlace is a 0–100 percentile computed from named public sources through a published pipeline. These pages state, for each of the five lenses, exactly what is measured, where the data comes from, how the score is computed — and what it cannot tell you.
Public data — municipal open-data portals, Statistics Canada Census 2021, police services, Natural Resources Canada — is computed into metrics at the dissemination-area level (400–700 residents), ranked into 0–100 percentiles within each city, combined with fixed published weights into five lens scores, and rolled up to neighbourhoods weighted by population. A score of 50 is the city median. Scores are ranks within one city, not absolute measurements, and they do not transfer between cities — with climate as the one stated exception.
Property Value
The Property Value score is a 0–100 percentile built from municipal assessment rolls, permit activity and rental economics. It describes how a neighbourhood's assessed values, growth and investment activity rank within its city. It is not built from MLS sold prices, and an assessed value is not a sale price.
Safety
The Safety score is a 0–100 percentile computed from seven measurable inputs: police-reported crime, traffic incidents, street-lighting density, drive time to the nearest fire station, police station and healthcare facility, and a modelled urban-noise level. A score of 70 means the neighbourhood ranks above 70% of neighbourhoods in the same city on that blend. It is not a guarantee, and it only counts what gets recorded.
Accessibility
The Accessibility score describes what is actually within reach of a neighbourhood — groceries, schools, transit, healthcare, parks and nine other amenity categories — measured by travel time on the real street network, not by drawing circles on a map. It is a 0–100 percentile within each city.
Census
The Census lens describes who lives in a neighbourhood and how, using Statistics Canada Census 2021 data at the finest granularity Statistics Canada publishes. More than 40 metrics — income, housing costs, age, language, commuting — feed the lens; seven of them combine into the Census score, a 0–100 percentile within each city.
Climate
The Climate score summarizes physical-hazard exposure across seven hazards: flood, wildfire, earthquake, landslide, radon, severe weather (hail and tornado) and heat. Every layer is built from a named national dataset, scored per dissemination area on a 0–100 scale where higher means lower hazard, and each hazard's sub-score is published separately so you can drill into the risk that matters to you.
Scoring
Every neighbourhood score on PickYourPlace is a percentile: a 0–100 rank against the other neighbourhoods in the same city, computed from public data through a four-layer pipeline. A 50 is the city median. An 80 ranks above four fifths of the city. This page explains the machinery those numbers come from — and exactly what a percentile cannot tell you.
The full list of upstream datasets, with per-city provenance and the limits of each, is on the data sources page.