Platform · Glossary
Local area.
The geography 3Y uses to compute the immediate area around a specific property. Unlike a fixed radius (1 mile, 3 miles, etc.), the local area is adaptive — sized to cover roughly 4 census tracts and about 15,000 residents.
Why adaptive, not fixed
A 1-mile radius around a property in Brooklyn covers tens of thousands of people. The same radius around a property in rural Idaho might cover a few hundred. Fixed radii produce comparisons that are not actually comparable across cities.
The local area, by holding population roughly constant, makes "the area around this property" a comparable concept whether the property sits in Manhattan, suburban Atlanta, or rural Montana. The radius scales: dense urban property may resolve to a local area under a mile; rural property may resolve up to ~10 miles. The denominator — about 15,000 people across about 4 tracts — stays roughly stable.
How the local area appears in a report
On the benchmarks section of a report, the header reads "Local area (X.X mi)" where X.X is the resolved adaptive radius. When the local-area walk fails — for example, in remote areas where the tract neighborhood graph runs into ocean, federal land, or sparse data — the header falls back to "Local area (county)" and the metrics come from the county fallback chain. The header itself is a transparency signal: users can see when 3Y is using its preferred adaptive local area versus when it has fallen back to broader data.
Local area vs. neighborhood
These are different concepts that serve different reporting purposes:
- Local area — the adaptive single radius used to compute area-comparable benchmarks (used in the Benchmarks section)
- Neighborhood — fixed concentric 1-, 3-, and 5-mile rings used to show how demographics change with distance from the property (used in the Neighborhood analytics section)