The Idea for Dwell
When searching for a home, it is difficult always to understand the tax situation for that particular home. Going to the Michigan.gov millage rate table, you can search by county, township, and school district to find your tax millage rate for a potential property.
But who has time to look that up for each property? And how do you even find what county, township and school district a property is located?
Two Ways of Implementation
Two ways of implementation: 1. Map (Left image) 2. Extension (Right image)
1: Interactive Map
The data was extracted from the Michigan.gov millage table into a JSON file in Python. Geo JSON files were found on ArcGIS (gis-michigan.opendata.arcgis.com).
Using a mapping API (mapbox), the map was created and embedded in an HTML page.
The user can select a location and view the expected homestead property tax monthly and yearly. The slider allows a change in the home value.
Feel free to play with it!
2: Chrome Extension
The chrome extension was created within the standard extension template (popup, options, background) in HTML and js.
The mapbox API was used again, this time using a geocoding call for county, township and school district, rather than creating a layered map.
The URL is used to determine the address of the location which is eventually compared to the JSON containing the homestead and non-homestead tax table and the geoJSON with each of the location variables.
The output is the tax % for that property.
2: Chrome Extension (Add addresses / locations)
The user can add notable locations to receive the distance and driving time. This is calculated using a simple API call comparing the two addresses.
This allows the user to quickly compare different properties.
Since this is a private, unpacked extension, this implementation is not shareable.
