Dutch indie maker Pieter Levels added Income mode to Hoodmaps on Thursday. The new layer paints U.S. neighborhoods by median income from the Census Bureau's American Community Survey, instead of the site's usual crowd-drawn labels.
The prompt was a Chicago Strava heatmap posted Monday by the account NYCer In Exile, who called the activity map a proxy for class and wealth. Levels quoted that post and said he could not put Strava's data into Hoodmaps because it is protected. Census tables, he wrote, already publish median income, are public, and are "very fresh and accurate." The live maps credit the source as "US Census Bureau (ACS), 2024." When someone called the figures outdated, he replied that they are not: ACS vintages lag the present by about nine to twelve months at any moment.
What shipped is a toggle, not a new company. In his words, you switch to Income mode and see where wealth concentrates and where it does not. That is a different signal from Hoodmaps' original layers. Those still come from users coloring blocks as tourist, cool, rich, suits, normies, or university areas and voting on text tags. Street maps show roads. Hoodmaps was built to show which part of a city a traveler is actually in.
Levels started the project on 31 March 2017, livestreamed the first hours on Twitch, and put it on Product Hunt, Hacker News, and Reddit on 9 July 2017. In the build log he published that month, he wrote that he kept landing in tourist centers and wanted a fast read on a city before booking. An earlier 2015 sketch for a friend visiting Amsterdam was the seed. The first version was a browser canvas on a map; drawings were stored and averaged so the most common label won a block. Map tiles on the current site are credited to MapTiler, with map data from OpenStreetMap.
Income mode does not replace that vote. It sits beside it. Crowd tags can be funny, local, and wrong in the same pass. ACS income is slower and official. It also stops at the U.S. border until he wires in other statistical offices. Minutes after the launch post he said he would add income data for European cities too. Asked whether the Netherlands was included, he pointed to CBS, the Dutch statistics agency, and did not say that layer was already live.
Hoodmaps is one title in a solo stack he still lists on his site: Nomads.com, Remote OK, Photo AI, Interior AI, and Hotelist.com, all bootstrapped. The Thursday post is a changelog on a nine-year-old map: swap a locked fitness heatmap for a public income table, keep the same city grid, and take country requests in the replies. The announcement crossed 100,000 views within a few hours. The next test is whether the European tables land with the same toggle, and whether travelers use a government number the way they used a crayon.
