SIDE STREETS: Get the skinny on prospective new hoods

There's a new Web site to add to your list of bookmarks to use when you are looking to move to a new neighborhood. Or use it for fun out of curiosity about where you live.

It's called ZIPskinny and it's full of all sorts of demographic information, presented in a way that doesn't require an MBA to understand.

It's as easy as plugging in your ZIP code. (For you Jerry Springer fans, that's the five-digit code at the end of your address the Postal Service uses to direct your mail.)

Visit my Side Streets blog at to see step-by-step directions for using ZIPskinny.

In a way, it's similar to sites like www.Zillow.com, which provides house-by-house real estate sales data. And it resembles Apartment Ratings.com, which incorporates information from the Colorado sex-offender registry to produce a map that shows convicted sex felons within a 1-mile radius of city apartments.

But ZIPskinny is not to be mistaken with www.RottenNeighbor.com, a real estate search engine that allows users to evaluate their neighborhoods, identify the homes of sex offenders or advertise a house.

ZIPskinny is more about pure numbers, sliced and diced into dozens of graphics that break down things like age, education and income levels of people in a ZIP. It's the same stuff available at the U.S. Census Bureau's American Fact Finder site, http://factfinder.census.gov (which is a good site for a government worker).

What makes ZIPskinny superior is its presentation and the ability to manipulate and compare various ZIPs.

For example, you can plug in your current home ZIP and the codes of several neighborhoods where you are considering relocating. ZIP codes are important because they are used in many ways.

Insurance companies won't do business in certain ZIP codes and use the codes to set rates. Marketing executives use ZIPs when targeting their advertising and mail drops.

Similarly, they are important in buying and selling real estate.

ZIPskinny will give you a side-by-side breakdown of all the neighborhoods. In a flash, you'll know if the neighborhood is more affluent with a higher median income than your current hood. And you'll know the population densities, the various education levels of the residents and how many are in blue-collar, management and executive-level jobs.

You can even find the unemployment rate and percentage of residents living under the poverty level.

The site isn't perfect. It uses census data, which means it's not up-to-the-minute in accuracy.

And if you are one of those poor Broadmoor-area folks who got yanked out of your exclusive 80906 ZIP and got dumped in that pedestrian 80905 code, you are going to be disappointed. The site hasn't been updated yet to show the bigger 80905.

Still, you can check out the old 80905 and see how you are viewed by advertisers.

Another neat feature of the site lets users create a custom widget for any ZIP and even embed it onto their personal Web sites and blogs.

One thing the site lacks is information about the site's creators. ZIPskinny says only that the site was created as a "hobby." And it cautions that its information can be dated, encouraging serious researchers to rely on the Census Web site.

Another site, www.ZIPwho.com, offers advance demographic searches and comparisons on a nationwide basis. It bills itself as "the most fun you can legally have with ZIP codes."

But most will probably prefer ZIPskinny, instead.

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Tell me about your neighborhood: 636-0193 or bill.vogrin@gazette.com