Announcing Lookout Map!
A mapping tool to help you map hazards around where you live or where you want to relocate to
Today I’m announcing that lookoutmap.com is live! It’s a detailed U.S. map of every hazard you could think of, with 70 layers and counting. It answers questions like:
“Is there an EPA Superfund site near me?”
“Are there Flock cameras on the way to work?”
“How much glyphosate is being sprayed near that property I want to make an offer on?”
And many more.
A Map for People Who Care about Freedom and their Health
I wanted to build a privacy-first routing service too, so Lookout Map runs its own routing server. That means instead of just knowing where the hazards are, you can route around them. This route below offers a way around most cameras in this dystopian town in New York State, going from over 22 cameras along the fastest route to just 6 with the alternative one. You can also choose to prioritize avoiding high crime areas or other hazards. Oh and unlike Google, we don’t store or log the routes or associate them with users.
Some of the layers are free, and some require a subscription. The county comparison feature is free, with 22 map layers comparing everything from crime rates and voting patterns to gas prices and the home value-to-income ratio - a crucial affordability metric. Over 700,000 cell, 5G, TV, and FM towers are free too.
Paid map layers include over 50,000 springs, EMF radiation modeling, nuclear fallout modeling, military bases, detailed LiDAR contours of the entire country (very useful if you want to site a pond, put in a driveway, or figure out if your neighbor’s farm is going to contaminate your future dream property with run-off), and dozens more.
If you do decide to subscribe you’re also supporting The Liberty Lookout, and you get access to other tools like a garden planner and several more that are currently in development (see libertytoolkit.com for all our sites). Most will be free, some will have paid features, and one subscription will cover them all.
More will be going live in the next few weeks, so look out for more announcements.
Why a subscription? Well, I considered trying to make a living from my Substack newsletter, but I just wasn’t sure if there was enough value there. With these tools I feel like I’m providing far more value to people, and I think the world needs more tools for liberty-minded folks to help them exit & build and achieve liberty in their lifetimes - rather than more newsletters (though I have no plans of stopping writing!).
The map is still in development. I’m actively adding more layers and improving functionality. If you want something added or fixed, let me know. I’d love to hear any feedback.
Why I Built The Lookout Map
When my wife and I were deciding where we should live, we had a lot of criteria. Freedom was important, but so was the weather. What were the gun laws like? Could I hunt with a silencer? Could we do a home birth? Will the homeschooling laws be onerous? If our A/C goes down in the summer, will we melt into a puddle of misery and sweat?
Questions like this turned out to be just the tip of the iceberg. What about severed estates? Many states have property laws that severed the land from the timber or mineral rights decades ago and buying a parcel you’d often never know. Realtors don’t have the best incentive structure when it comes to selling you land, so don’t expect them to do all the research for you.
You could easily end up with a nice parcel, build a house, and then 10 years later the company that owns the mining rights decides it’s going to come for what’s underground and bulldoze everything in its way. So much for your dream homestead.
What about restrictive covenants that say you can’t have chickens or hang your laundry outside? (No, seriously, we saw several properties like that). Is there an EPA Superfund site nearby that’s contaminating your future well? A nearby military base that would be a target in a major nuclear exchange? Wildfires? Earthquakes? Glyphosate contamination? The list of hazards is almost endless.
Then there’s consideration that must be given to the trappings of modern civilizations. Cell towers and transmission lines. EMF exposure is a serious issue, as I’ve been writing about tirelessly.
It took us a few years to settle on which state we wanted to live in (and we moved a lot before we did), and then another few years to settle on a county and finally buy the property we wanted. Along the way I consulted dozens of maps, data sheets on EMF exposure, and drove around with EMF meters to dozens of properties.
After going through that experience, many of our friends and family have been asking me for advice. How do I check if my property floods? What’s the safe distance to a cell tower? I realized we weren’t the only ones who were so picky! It makes sense. If you’re going to put down roots and build a homestead that you hope your kids will inherit, you don’t want to do that right next to a toxic dump. Spending an extra year or two looking for the right place can save you many headaches later on.
Of course, no place is perfect, and you’ll have to make compromises or you’ll end up like some of our other friends - years into the search and never finding anything. I’d rather be on imperfect land than renting in an apartment in a city.
The truth is every property has something wrong with it, but don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. Find something that meets enough of your criteria in a state that respects enough of your freedoms, and then start homesteading, plant a garden, get chickens, do your thing, and breathe the fresh air of freedom.
For instance, our property had no streams or running water; so rather than spend far more money on one that did, we just built ponds and collect rainwater from our roof.
I built this mapping tool to help the thousands of liberty-minded people out there looking for a place to call home. And for the people who are already settled in, this’ll make you far more aware of your surroundings and the hazards nearby so that you can better prepare for them.
I’m also a software engineer and a map nerd, so building this was just frankly fun.
Please check out lookoutmap.com and let me know what you think!