I've talked to at least a dozen people who moved into SF in the last 16 months and every one of them used Padmapper, including me. It's great. If Craigslist ever made acquisitions... or added features... this would/should be at the top of the list.
Agree with everything you said. I also moved to SF recently and used PadMapper. There's no reason to use anything else.
Unfortunately, the crime map overlay is kind of useless as it's total crime, not per capita, so it makes dense areas look more dangerous than they really are.
Yeah, I'm going to try redoing the overlay with homicides and other violent crimes pretty soon.
It's tough to normalize this kind of thing well, since there's an argument to be made that if there's a shooting on your block, it'll feel dangerous no matter how many people there are living there. Also, primarily commercial districts would get unfairly dinged if it was normalization per capita... would be better with foot traffic in that case.
A shooting is bad enough that it should show up regardless of the population density. But I certainly would feel a lot less safe if a shooting took place on a street where only 10 people lived, so density is still a valid factor.
I agree foot traffic might be a better metric than population, though.
They also made the SF Crime Map Overlay which was covered on HN: http://www.padmapper.com/blog/2010/07/19/san-francisco-crime...