Online Resources to Help You Scope Out New Neighborhood

The parent mandate: ensure your child’s physical and mental safety. For parents this means that we must ensure that they have a safe on and offline environment. Sudden moves can make finding a safe home environment difficult. Thankfully there are online tactics to ensure that your new neighborhood will be the safe haven you expect it to be. You can now ensure the safety of future home before you even show up for the initial house viewing.

View full safety infographic here. 

Many government and commercial sites provide easily accessible crime statistics online. You can weed out the dens of crime and pinpoint the safe harbors. Here are a few potential types of sites to look into:

• Many national sites (neighborhoodscout and spotcrime) collect crime statistic and set up crime maps. It’s on a very large scale, so you should be able to scout locations not in the same general area.
• Once you know where you must live, you can check out the local police site. The police sites often offer crime statistics and updates. For example one Idaho site offers crime mapping of the area that the police force covers.  The map pinpoints how many crimes took place, where they happened, and what the crime was.
• Many safety dedicated websites construct articles and host content like infographs that report on the safety of the neighborhoods and states. 

This is the digital age. A tech savvy individual knows that you can utilize social media to do more than tweet about your breakfast and connect with family. Social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Google+, can all be used to scout out if a neighborhood is safe. Social media can illuminate the safety of the neighborhood on a deeper level. After all, crime maps can only include reported crimes. Individuals see far more.

Here are a few tips:

• Check out the social media profiles of high profile individuals or organizations in the area you contemplating moving to.
• If you don’t find anything, look at who’s following the larger local organizations. Check out their followers social media. Don’t be afraid to contact a few people who live in the area to get their opinion on the safety of the neighborhood.
• Use hashtags (#) to search out key phrases that can help you locate unsafe areas. Ex: #unsafeneighborhood or #crime.

Apps

The smartphone era has led to the rise of useful apps. Due to this fact, you can now determine how safe a neighborhood is with a few taps of a button. Here are a few of the neighborhood safety apps that you might want to check out.

• Safe Neighborhood. An android app that pinpoints all of the registered sex offenders in the area.
• Be Safe! An iPhone app that provides a real time crime map in New York, Paris, and London. It shows the danger risk in the areas and what crimes happen there. For $1, you can unlock more than 230 other areas.
• Suburb Scout is an Android app that allows you to pinpoint potentially dangerous areas in your potential neighborhoods. Don’t be unpleasantly surprised by prisons, rail crossings, landfills, or nuclear plants that could provide hidden dangers to your children. This app requires a $5.99 purchase. 

Moves can be stressful. Between finding a solid school system, an affordable home, and a nice looking neighborhood, it can be difficult to ensure that all of our safety standards as parents are met. This problem is compounded when you move out of state because you lack any knowledge of the area. Thankfully technology has created tons of resources that parents can use to ensure the safety of the neighborhood before moving in.