Data sources for Nomading USA

Where each number comes from, what it measures, and what it does not.

Government data

Rent near downtown. HUD Small Area Fair Market Rents, published yearly by ZIP code: the 40th-percentile rent, utilities included, paid by recent movers. We take the ZIP codes that touch a 2-mile circle around downtown (Census ZIP Code Tabulation Areas) and use the median, so the headline rent describes the same place as the walkability score and not the cheapest edge of the metro. This is the headline housing number, based on a 1-bedroom.
Rent across the metro area. HUD's metro-wide Fair Market Rent, shown beside the downtown figure with the gap between them.
Current-tenant rent, home values, commuting, car ownership, population. US Census Bureau American Community Survey, read through Census Reporter.
Walkability. EPA National Walkability Index, scored 1 to 20 per census block group. We average the block groups within 2 and 5 miles of downtown, weighted by population.
Weather. NOAA US Climate Normals for 1991 to 2020: average high, low and precipitation for each month at the nearest major weather station, named on the city page.
Air quality. EPA Air Quality Index annual summary for the county: how many days were good, moderate or unhealthy.
Natural hazards. FEMA National Risk Index ratings for the county. They are relative to other counties, not a forecast.
Unemployment. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Local Area Unemployment Statistics, for the county.
Internet providers and coverage. FCC Broadband Data Collection figures as published by broadbandmap.com. Speeds are the fastest plan advertised, not a measured speed.

Other sources

Asking rent and typical home value. Zillow Observed Rent Index and Zillow Home Value Index, from Zillow Research.
Airbnb prices. Inside Airbnb listing snapshots (CC BY 4.0) where a city is covered: the median nightly price of entire homes. Airbnb publishes no market data and its terms forbid scraping, so the other cities use the median nightly rate from AirROI's licensed market model, shown with its attribution line. Those are modeled estimates, not listing counts.
Breweries. Open Brewery DB, a free MIT-licensed directory kept by volunteers. We count entries inside each city's limits that are not closed or still planning. Suburbs are left out and new openings can lag.
Bike score. PeopleForBikes City Ratings 2026.
Public land and camping. BLM land from the Bureau of Land Management's Surface Management Agency map service, national forests and campgrounds from the US Forest Service's boundary and recreation-site services, BLM campgrounds from the BLM recreation-site service, all queried within 50 miles of downtown. RV parks are counted on OpenStreetMap within 30 miles and undercount.
Coworking spaces and makerspaces. Mapped on OpenStreetMap within 10 miles of downtown, listed by name with the website or map entry. Volunteer-kept, so it undercounts.
Sleeping in a vehicle. Read by hand from the state statute or city code, linked on the city page. Cities whose code could not be read in full show no rule rather than a summary from a secondary source.
Cafes, coworking spaces and libraries. Counted within 2 miles of downtown from OpenStreetMap. Volunteers keep that map up, so some places are missing.
City photos. Public domain and CC0 photos of local landmarks from Wikimedia Commons. Each city page credits the photographer and links to the original file.
Transit fares, internet prices, indie hacking scene. Read by hand from the linked page, with the month it was read.

What residents say they pay

Each city page has a short form where readers who live there report what they pay for rent, coworking, coffee, lunch and internet. Those reports never replace the sourced figures; they sit beside them as a second opinion. A number is shown once three people have reported it, marked low confidence until there are five, as the middle value of the last 12 months of reports with the highest and lowest 10% set aside, so one wrong or mischievous entry cannot move it. Each sender can report a given number once a day; the site keeps a salted hash of the sender's address for that rule and nothing else.

Estimates and gaps

Room rents are an estimate, half the HUD 2-bedroom rent, unless a published figure is linked. Food prices come from local, non-chain menus, up to five per city, each linked on the city page. When a number is missing the page says so. Nothing is filled in by guesswork.

Who makes this, and how

Nomading USA is made by Jessyka, an independent developer in Anaheim, California, who works remotely and wanted a city list where every number could be checked instead of a blended score. She chooses the sources, reads the hand-collected figures (transit fares, internet plans, local menus, meetups) from the pages linked beside them, and reviews new cities before they go live.

The pages themselves are generated by a build script from the data files behind the site: the script fetches each automated source, computes the medians and rankings described above, and writes the HTML. New cities are researched with the help of an AI assistant that must cite the page it read for every figure, and anything it cannot source stays blank. No prose on the site is written to fill space; every sentence with a number is produced from the data and checked by the build.

Reuse the data

The whole dataset is on the data page as CSV and JSON under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. Cite it as "Nomading USA (nomadingusa.com)" with the month shown on the page.

Privacy

This site has no accounts, no analytics and sets no cookies. The suggestion form emails what you type to the site owner and nothing else; it does not record your IP address, and leaving your contact is optional. Maps load tiles from OpenStreetMap and the map library from unpkg, and city photos load from Wikimedia Commons. Each of those sees your IP address like any web request.