move2westlinn

A Birds-Eye View of West Linn Development Over Time

Ron Ares August 21st, 2007

Real estate junkies like me, will appreciate this view of West Linn and its historical reference for home construction.

Developed by online real estate listings site Trulia, this new application, called Hindsight plots a sampling of an area’s home construction dates on top of a Microsoft Virtual Earth map. A timeline automatically starts scrolling from around the turn of the 20th century and as homes were built over time, they ‘bloom’ on the map.

Here is a view of the West Linn timeline:

The screen image shown above doesn’t do it justice. Click on the image or here to see it in its full glory.

As you might expect, the Willamette, Sunset, and Bolton neighborhoods are the first to appear on the map, but the bulk of West Linn home building took place after the ’70’s–with a healthy boom in the 1990’s.

The best way to view this is to stare at the middle of the screen and let your peripheral vision absorb the data as the timeline scrolls. Zoom in for a little more detail, or zoom out to see the Portland metropolitan area.

How helpful is this? If you’re not from West Linn or familiar with the area, you can pause, then slowly advance the scrollbar on the timeline to see where the homes of vintage construction have been built or where newer homes can be found.

Link to Trulia Hindsight.

If nothing else, it’s fun….this coming from a real estate/mapping junkie