The Trulia real estate service has an interesting new feature called Hindsight that shows neighborhood development trends over time. Here’s the Hindsight map for our part of Capitol Hill. Each dot represents a property entering the public record — the colors correspond to the year in which the property first existed with green representing the earliest properties, purple, the latest. The maps “play” across time so you can watch the dots emerge for each year in the timeline.

You can see that most homes in our neighborhood came into existence prior to 1930 with a big spike in 1906 — that’s the same year as the legendary San Francisco earthquake, of course, so it seems like Seattle may have benefited from the destruction to the south. It’s also interesting to note where most of the area development has occurred post-1950 — you only find the more-recent blue and purple dots down the hill off Madison for the most part with a few scattered here and there between this part of the hill and Broadway.

The old houses in this area are survivors and up against a sea of “purple dots” — check out Bellevue, for example. We’re lucky to have so many “green dots.”

–j/k