Free map

Every county in your state, ranked.

Pick a state and get it as a Google Earth layer: every county in it scored 0–100 on the four things a homestead cannot do without — water, privacy, hazard exposure and access. Nothing is screened out and every county is clickable, so you get the whole state rather than somebody else's shortlist. Leave an email address, confirm it, and the download link comes by email.

Google Earth view of Oregon with every county shaded from orange to dark green by its rank within the state. The southwest is darkest green; a band through the centre is orange. — **Oregon** — 36 counties.

Google Earth view of Missouri with all of its counties shaded from orange to dark green by rank within the state. Counties along the northern border are darkest green; the Kansas City and St. Louis areas are orange. — **Missouri** — 115 counties.

Google Earth view of New Hampshire with its ten counties shaded by rank within the state: green across the north, orange in the south toward Boston. — **New Hampshire** — 10 counties.

Darkest green is the top tier in that state; orange is the bottom. Every county is clickable for its scores.

Small states, and an apology.

We're sorry about this one. The map ranks each county only against the others in the same state, so it can only be as detailed as that state's county lines allow. Where a state has just a few counties, or a few very large ones, you'll get a handful of broad blocks of colour instead of a real gradient. That's far less than we'd like to give you, and we're genuinely sorry it falls short there.

Washington, DC is the extreme case: it counts as a single county, so the whole District is one colour with nothing to rank it against. Every county still has its full scores in its balloon, so the numbers are there even where the colours can't say much. If your state is one of these, we apologise, and we'd still rather give you the honest version than invent differences that aren't there.

Base imagery © Google.

Pick your state.

Each one is a .kmz plus a written guide, under 60 KB. The address is the price — the download link comes by email, and after that a few sends a year when a layer is corrected or a new one lands, never weekly.

The download link comes by email. AWeber first sends a confirmation — nothing else goes out until you click the link in it — then the map link follows within a minute. Every send unsubscribes in one click, and the address goes nowhere else: see privacy.

What it actually measures

Four blocks, weighted. The weights are an opinion and the layer says so — but every one of them is stated, and every county's numbers are in its balloon, so you can disagree with the arithmetic rather than guess at it.

Water, 40% — the better of rainfall and well depth rather than the average of them, because they are redundancy, not substitutes. Drought takes the rain away across a whole region at once; a deep aquifer rides out several dry years and then depletes permanently. A county with both gets a bonus, because that is categorically better than either alone and a plain maximum cannot say so.
Privacy, 25% — population density on a curve, multiplied by how much of the county is actually developed, and again for sitting inside a metro commuting ring.
Hazard, 20% — the single worst hazard, not the mean. Which hazards you will accept is personal: a Gulf Coast buyer accepts hurricanes and a Californian accepts earthquakes, but nobody accepts an average of the two. Each hazard is ranked against its own national distribution, using annualized frequency rather than expected loss — which otherwise reads an empty county as safe simply because there is nothing there to destroy.
Access, 15% — straight-line distance to the nearest town of 5,000 or more. It peaks in a band and falls off both sides, because being in the town is a different problem from being three hours from one.

Internet is reported in the balloon and deliberately not scored: connectivity runs directly against remoteness, so scoring both in one index makes them cancel out.

This screens places, not parcels. It tells you where to look, not what to buy — not the flood zone, not deeded access, not whether there is water on the ground.

Why one state and not the country

Because a national ranking has a region, and a free map whose job is to be useful to you specifically should not spend its one chance telling you to move to Arkansas. Ranked nationally on a wetter, more wooded thesis, fifteen states hold every high scorer and thirty-seven have none at all — so a reader in Montana or Texas opens it, finds nothing, and leaves. Asked one state at a time, the question becomes answerable everywhere: can you get water, get out, and not be wiped out.

All 50 states, DC and Puerto Rico are built. Take the one you are actually shopping in — or see each state's top counties first.

Or email to buy all 35 layers — $49