← Browse Dives
Full screen
Screenshot of The Bay Builds Out, Not Up
Loading Interactive Dive...

The Bay Builds Out, Not Up

An isometric pixel-art map of every building in the core Bay Area (San Francisco to San Jose), built from Overture Maps footprints and heights in 250 m blocks. The thesis: one of the priciest housing markets in the U.S. is almost entirely low-rise — 94% of built-up blocks top out under 15 m (~5 stories) and only 0.4% reach high-rise, so the region's whole skyline is three downtowns (SF, Oakland, San Jose). Three views: Build-up (height typology with a distribution bar), Density (buildings per block), and Price (ZIP-level Zillow home values joined via Overture address ZIPs, with the proof that 96% of the priciest third of blocks stay low-rise). Plus a "Dense & low" highlight, the real freeway network, modeled terrain, place labels, and per-block hover with height, building count, ground elevation, and area home value.

MapExplorerCivic
Author: Mehrab Rahman  ·  June 15, 2026    Region: us-west-2

AI Prompts Used

1Prompt 1
Build me a MotherDuck Dive: an isometric, SimCity-style pixel map of every building in the core Bay Area (San Francisco down to San Jose), rendered to an HTML canvas from real Overture Maps data. Aggregate building footprints and heights into 250 m grid cells, classify each cell as land / park / water via spatial joins against Overture's land-use and water polygons, and draw each cell as a 2:1 isometric tile extruded to its tallest building. Lead with a clear thesis as the title — the Bay barely builds up — and prove it with a live-computed headline stat (share of built blocks under 15 m ≈ 5 stories) plus a small height-distribution bar. Give it color modes for height typology, building density, and ZIP-level home value (join Zillow ZHVI, read directly via read_csv, to ZIPs derived from Overture address points), a "dense but low" highlight, the real freeway network as cased lines, modeled hill terrain, place labels, and a hover tooltip. Watch the isometric projection handedness so the geography isn't mirrored — SF must end up west of Oakland.

Comments

Log in to leave a comment.

No comments yet. Be the first!