During a Census Bureau webinar, real estate brokerage firm Redfin Corporation demonstrated how it used a combination of private and public data — including LODES, the American Community Survey (ACS), Census Bureau population estimates and Bureau of Labor statistics — to develop the Opportunity Score, a data tool based on the Walkability Score that helps Americans find affordable housing with short commutes to jobs.
“One of our goals was really to help people understand job accessibility,” said Taylor Marr, lead economist for Redfin. “For any address you can look up and see … how accessible via a car-free commute is each property or house to good-paying jobs.”
The Redfin Opportunity Score, available in more than 350 U.S. cities, is a rating from zero to 100 that measures the number of jobs within a 30-minute commute from a given address. The higher the score, the greater the access to nearby jobs. For example, the White House has an opportunity score of 100. That means there are a lot of jobs within 30 minutes (without a car) of where the White House is located.
