How every score
is measured.
Neighbourhood scores on PickYourPlace run from 0 to 100, built from percentile ranks of 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 from municipal open-data portals, Statistics Canada Census 2021, police services, and 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. Inputs are ranks within one city (a 50 is the city median); lens scores blend those ranks, so a 50 is roughly typical rather than exactly the median. Neither is an absolute measurement, and they do not transfer between cities, with climate as the one stated exception.
Property Value
The Property Value score is a 0–100 score built from within-city percentile ranks of municipal assessment rolls, permit activity and the legacy Census shelter-cost ratio. 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 score 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. Each input is ranked within the same city and the ranks are blended with fixed weights, so a 70 is a strong result for that city, not a claim that the neighbourhood ranks above 70% of it. 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 score built from within-city percentile ranks.
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 score built from within-city percentile ranks.
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 built from percentile ranks: each input is ranked 0–100 against the rest of the same city, and fixed weights blend those ranks into a lens score. A lens score is a weighted blend of ranks, not a rank itself, so a 60 does not mean a neighbourhood sits above 60% of its city. This page explains the machinery those numbers come from, and exactly what they cannot tell you.
The full list of upstream datasets, with per-city provenance and the limits of each, is on the data sources page.