Metro Boston Town Explorer
Explore all 101 municipalities in the Metropolitan Area Planning Council (MAPC) region. Hover or tap a town boundary, choose what you want to know, and compare demographics and household income from the U.S. Census Bureau — with home prices, school rankings, and municipal tax data ready to plug in as those sources are connected.
What to showPinned
Hover or tap a town on the map — the categories you check appear in its detail panel.
Checked categories appear in the detail panel. Click the town to keep it pinned while you explore.
Data sources
Town boundaries — MassGIS
MassGIS statewide town boundary layer (TOWNS_SURVEY_POLY, 351 communities), filtered to the 101 MAPC municipalities and simplified for the web. Downloaded October 29, 2026. Attribution: MassGIS, Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
Demographics & income — U.S. Census Bureau, ACS
American Community Survey 5-year 2024 estimates (period 2020–2024), accessed via the Census Reporter API. Race/ethnicity from table B03002; median household income from B19013; average (mean) household income computed as B19025 aggregate household income ÷ B25003 occupied housing units. All ACS figures are estimates with margins of error, not counts.
Home sale prices — MLS
Waiting on MLS access (expected: MLS PIN via RESO Web API, RETS, or export). When connected, this explorer will show town-level aggregates only — trailing-12-month number of sales, median and average sale price — from a home-sales.json data file.
School rankings — Niche
Niche offers no general public API, so rankings will be loaded from a manually curated CSV (niche.csv) with district grade, national and state rank, ranking year, and a link back to each town’s Niche page. No scraping is used.
Property tax & tax base — MA DLS + town sites
Planned source: Massachusetts Division of Local Services (DLS) Municipal Databank, verified against each municipality’s own website. Will show the residential rate per $1,000 (and commercial rate where a split rate applies), total levy, and assessed value / levy share by class — residential, commercial, industrial, personal property — for a single fiscal year, from a tax.json data file.
