About
Who’s behind Saktoo
My name is Sean Hingco, and I build and maintain Saktoo on my own. There is no team page here because there is no team. Every scoring decision on this site, including the ones I think are wrong, is mine, and you can reach me about any of them at support@saktoo.com.
Saktoo covers Los Angeles and Orange County: 7,644 hexagons, 346 named neighborhoods and 164 cities as of 2026-08-20. It scores places on rent, commute, walkability, environment and lifestyle, and it will tell you which of those it is unsure about rather than smoothing the gap over.
I started this because the honest version of the question is not “which listing should I take,” it is “where should I be looking at all,” and that second question is the one no apartment site will answer for you. Answering it well means taking a position on what counts as a good neighborhood, and taking a position means being willing to publish the parts I got wrong.
The decisions I’d rather be judged on
Anyone can claim to be data-driven. What actually separates two neighborhood tools is what they refuse to put a number on. These are the four refusals I would defend hardest, and they are the same four published to journalists on the data page.
- 01
No neighborhood scores for schools
School outcomes track race and income closely, so rating a neighborhood on them would encode demographics into a ranking. Per-school state figures are published with their source and year on neighborhood pages; no school figure is read by any scoring code.
- 02
Overcrowding is published but never scored
It correlates 0.68 with Hispanic population share in this region, so weighting it into any index would systematically penalize immigrant neighborhoods.
- 03
Reported incidents are reports, not crime
They measure what was reported to and recorded by police, which varies with trust and staffing. Blank never means zero incidents, only no coverage. Where safety_is_citywide_figure is yes, the number is a whole jurisdiction's rate.
- 04
Park distance is to a point, not a boundary
OpenStreetMap gives park positions rather than outlines, so a large park reads as farther away than its edge actually is.
The third one bothered me enough that I built a separate tool to show it. Take two real San Francisco neighborhoods, three years of real police reports, and four defensible ways of counting, and the two of them trade places on which is “safer.” Same data, different answer: see it swap.
Where the numbers come from
Every figure on this site traces to a named public dataset with a year on it. None of it is proprietary, none of it is scraped from a listings site, and all of it is downloadable.
- Rent, home value, commute time, housing stock
- American Community Survey 5-year, US Census Bureau
- Diesel particulates and traffic exposure
- CalEnviroScreen 4.0, California OEHHA
- Tree canopy
- NLCD, US Geological Survey
- Walkability, transit access, density
- EPA Smart Location Database
- Restaurants, cafes, groceries, parks, gyms
- OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL
- Reported incidents
- LAPD and LA County Sheriff street-level records, CA DOJ OpenJustice elsewhere
The full dictionary, the licence for each column and the citation line live on the data page. If you are a reporter, that page is the one you want.
What it still gets wrong
Of the 346 neighborhood names Saktoo publishes, I audited every one and found 45 that no resident would recognize, mostly in Orange County, where a boundary file gave a cluster of blocks a name nobody uses. They are flagged in the published data rather than quietly deleted, because a reporter who downloads the file deserves to know which rows I do not trust.
Coverage is uneven. Reported-incident data is street-level inside Los Angeles and the Sheriff’s jurisdiction, and a citywide average everywhere else, which is a much blunter instrument. A blank cell never means zero. It means no agency published a number I could stand behind.
And the whole thing is one region deep. Saktoo knows Los Angeles and Orange County properly and nowhere else at all. I would rather cover two counties honestly than fifty badly.
Try it, or argue with it
The quiz takes about three minutes and needs no account. If it puts a neighborhood in front of you that you know is wrong, that is worth an email to me, and it is how most of the list above got written.