The 2026 Proximity Radius Report: How Close Is "Neighborhood" in 1,250 U.S. Metros?

Why We Measured This

Every roofer, HVAC tech, and electrician has run the same play at some point: finish a job, then try to turn the houses around it into the next job. Yard signs, door hangers, postcards to "the neighborhood." The play works because neighbors see the truck, see the crew, and see the finished work.

But nobody could tell you what "the neighborhood" actually is. Is it a quarter mile? A ZIP code? Three streets? Marketers have been guessing, and most of the guesses are too big. A ZIP code is a postal accounting unit, not a neighborhood. If your targeting tool thinks in ZIP codes, you're paying to mail people who never saw your truck.

So we measured it. This report defines a hard number for the question "how far do I have to go from a job site to reach the 100 nearest homes?" — across 1,248 measured U.S. metros. We call that number the proximity radius, and we think it should become the standard sizing unit for proximity mail marketing.

Here's the short version: the neighborhood is smaller than you think. In the typical American metro, the 100 nearest homes to a job site sit within about 187 meters — roughly 614 feet. That's the block you just worked on and the two behind it.

The Method: 90 Million Front Doors, One Question

The measurement runs on the Quillus address corpus: 90,390,644 mailable single-family homes across 1,249 cities in 48 states, integrated with U.S. Census ACS 2024 five-year estimates (geo snapshot dated 2026-06-13). Every address in the corpus is geocoded — pinned to an exact latitude and longitude — which is what lets us do exact proximity counts instead of ZIP-code-level approximations.

The metric itself is simple to state. For each metro, sample addresses from the corpus and ask: how far away is the 100th-nearest home? That distance is the 100-home radius for that address. The metro's proximity radius is the median of those distances — computed with k-nearest-neighbor analysis over the geocoded corpus. This is a Quillus-computed figure; it isn't available from other sources, because you can't compute it without a geocoded address corpus at this scale.

Why 100 homes? Because that's the natural unit of a job-site campaign: one completed job, one wave of cards to the closest people who could have watched the work happen. It's also small enough to be cheap to test and big enough to matter.

One honesty note on the data: the Census figures woven into this corpus are ACS five-year estimates. Where we cite year-over-year movement later in this report, that's a change between two five-year estimates — a smoothed change, not annual growth. We label it that way because that's what it is.

The Headline Number: 187 Meters

Across 1,248 measured metros, the per-city median proximity radius is about 187 meters (~614 feet).

Weight the number by home count instead — so it represents the typical mailable home rather than the typical city — and it gets even tighter: 145 meters, about 476 feet. The weighted figure is smaller because bigger metros pack more homes per square mile, and more of America's homes live in those denser metros.

Put that in job-site terms. From the driveway where your trailer is parked, 100 mailboxes typically sit within a football field and a half. You could walk the whole campaign footprint during your lunch break.

And the radius almost never blows out, anywhere:

• In 95% of cities, the 100 nearest homes fit inside a quarter mile (~402 m).
• In 99.8% of cities, they fit inside a half mile.
• In 100% of measured cities, they fit inside one mile.

There is no measured metro in America where "the 100 nearest homes" means more than a mile of reach. The neighborhood is real, it's walkable, and it's measurable.

The Spread: From 62-Meter Blocks to the Wide End

The median hides the range, and the range is where campaign sizing gets interesting. The 10th-to-90th percentile band runs from about 115 meters in the densest metros to about 311 meters in the most spread-out ones.

The tight end. The metros with the smallest proximity radii are Greenbelt, MD; Hermosa Beach, CA; and Boston, MA:

• Greenbelt, MD: the 100 nearest homes sit within ~62 meters (~203 feet) of a typical job, across 27,418 mailable homes at ~2,596 homes per square mile. Sixty-two meters. Your extension ladder laid down four times.
• Hermosa Beach, CA: ~66 meters (~217 feet), with 21,812 mailable homes packed at ~15,298 homes per square mile.
• Boston, MA: ~68 meters (~223 feet), across 397,759 mailable homes at ~8,122 homes per square mile.

In markets like these, one finished roof is visible — literally, out the window — to the entire 100-home campaign footprint.

The wide end. The most spread-out metros in the dataset are Cullman, AL; Lumberton, NC; and Placerville, CA. Even at the wide end of the distribution — where the 90th-percentile band reaches ~311 meters — remember the ceiling: the 100 nearest homes still fit inside a half mile in 99.8% of cities. "Spread out" in America still means neighborhood-scale, not county-scale.

Density Explains Half the Story — Neighborhoods Explain the Rest

The obvious driver is density, and the data confirms it — partly. Splitting the 1,248 cities into density quartiles:

• Least dense quartile (Q1): median ~154 homes/sq mi, median radius 257 m (~843 ft)
• Most dense quartile (Q4): median ~2,729 homes/sq mi, median radius 126 m (~413 ft)

That's a 2.0× spread between suburban-rural and urban markets. Note the asymmetry: density jumps roughly 18-fold between those quartiles, but the radius only doubles.

Here's the part that surprised us. On a log-log fit, the correlation between city density and radius is r = −0.71 (R² = 0.51) — density explains about half the variation. But the fitted elasticity is −0.24, where pure grid geometry predicts −0.5 (radius should shrink with the square root of density).

Why is the real curve so much shallower than the math says it should be? Because city-level density is an average smeared across a whole postal area — but homes cluster into neighborhoods even in spread-out markets. A low-density metro isn't homes sprinkled evenly across empty land; it's tight little subdivisions with space between them. Land your job site inside one of those clusters — which is where the jobs are — and the 100 nearest homes are still close.

The operator takeaway: proximity mail stays neighborhood-scale no matter what your city's raw density number says. You don't need a dense market for the job-site radius play to work. You need a job site with neighbors, and almost every job site has them.

For route economics, density still matters at the margin: higher residential density means more homes reached per mile of route driven. The median across the corpus is ~686 homes per square mile, with the densest metros — Sunny Isles Beach, FL (~25,478/sq mi), Hermosa Beach, CA (~15,298), Aventura, FL (~13,693), Miami Beach, FL (~9,288), and Venice, CA (~9,064) — being outliers at the top.

State by State: Where the Radius Runs Tight and Where It Runs Wide

Among states with at least five measured cities, the median 100-home radius varies by 166 meters between the tightest and most spread-out states.

Tightest state medians:

Most spread-out state medians:

If you run crews in Portland or Baltimore, your 100-home footprint is barely bigger than a city block. If you run crews in Alabama, Georgia, or the Carolinas, plan for a radius more than twice as wide — but still, in nearly every case, inside a half-mile circle.

What This Means for Sizing a Job-Site Campaign

Three practical rules fall straight out of the data.

1. Stop sizing campaigns in ZIP codes. The corpus was built specifically to enable exact proximity counts instead of ZIP-code-level approximations, and the numbers show why: the real unit of "saw your truck" is a couple hundred meters, not a postal boundary. A radius sized to the 100 nearest geocoded homes hugs the streets that actually witnessed the job.

2. Size by home count, not by distance. A fixed 500-meter circle over-mails in Boston (where 100 homes need ~68 m) and can under-perform in the widest markets. Fixing the count at 100 and letting the radius float — 62 m in Greenbelt, out toward ~311 m at the 90th percentile — keeps every campaign the same size and cost while adapting to local geography automatically.

3. Budget the same everywhere. Because 100 homes fit inside a quarter mile in 95% of cities, a per-job mail wave costs the same in Cullman as it does in Hermosa Beach: 100 cards. The geography changes; the campaign doesn't.

The Radius Is Only Half the Targeting Story

Knowing where the 100 nearest homes are is step one. The corpus carries market and housing signals that tell you whether those homes are worth mailing for your trade.

Who's home matters. Median owner-occupancy across the 1,249 metros is 69.9% — owner-occupancy being the share of homes where the decision-maker for a roof, HVAC, or exterior job actually lives on-site, which is exactly who a job-site postcard needs to reach at the door.

Housing-stock age matters, especially for exterior trades. The median year built across the metros is 1984, which puts much of the national housing stock in second- or third-cycle roof-replacement age. The oldest-stock metros are strong roofing-demand signals: Hamtramck, MI (median built 1941, 31,858 mailable homes); Buffalo, NY (1943, 92,250 homes); Reading, PA (1943, 26,452 homes); Scranton, PA (1945, 28,909 homes); and Ferndale, MI (1946, 21,469 homes). Detroit alone holds 1,084,977 mailable homes with a median build year of 1947 — a million-home market where the median roof deck has seen close to eight decades of weather. Cleveland (1946, 153,793 homes) and Rochester, NY (1946, 68,671 homes) run the same profile.

Home-value movement matters too. Comparing the ACS 2023 and 2024 five-year estimates — a smoothed change between overlapping estimates, not an annual growth rate — the biggest median home-value gainers in the dataset were Brunswick, GA (+26.2% to $254,900), Salton City, CA (+24.9% to $195,200), Conyers, GA (+23.0% to $308,700), Santa Rosa Beach, FL (+21.7% to $929,200), and Seneca, SC (+21.7% to $344,900). Rising home values are a signal that owners are investing in their properties — the kind of streets where a finished-job postcard lands on a decision that's already half made.

Notice that three of those five value-movers sit in Georgia and South Carolina — two of the most spread-out states by proximity radius. Wide-radius markets are not weak markets. They just need count-based sizing instead of distance-based guessing.

The Standard We're Proposing

Here's the definition we're putting on the record, because as of mid-2026 nobody else has: the exact phrase "proximity mail marketing" returned zero results on Google's exact-phrase search on June 15, 2026, a finding corroborated on Bing, with no measurable search demand in Google Trends going back to 2004. A follow-up scan on July 2, 2026 confirmed the phrase still returns effectively zero results, with no third party adopting the term and no answer engine defining it. The category is unclaimed. This report is us claiming it — with a number.

Proximity mail marketing is direct mail sized and targeted by the measured proximity radius of a job site: the distance to the N nearest geocoded homes, not a ZIP code and not a guess.

The 2026 benchmark values, from k-nearest-neighbor analysis across 1,248 metros and 90.4 million geocoded homes:

• Standard proximity radius (100 homes, per-city median): 187 m / ~614 ft
• Home-weighted median: 145 m / ~476 ft
• 10th–90th percentile band: ~115 m to ~311 m
• Quarter-mile coverage: 95% of cities; half-mile: 99.8%; one mile: 100%

The June 15, 2026 measurement baseline is archived with per-capture SHA-256 checksums, designated as the anchor point for annual re-measurement. We'll re-run the radius analysis on the same footing. If your market's neighborhoods tighten or spread, next year's report will show it.

Check Your Own Radius

The 187-meter figure is the national median. Your market has its own number, and your next job site has its own 100 homes.

If you finish jobs and wonder how far your reputation actually carries down the street, the honest answer from 90.4 million front doors is: about 187 meters — roughly 614 feet. If you want to see what the 100-home radius looks like around an address you actually work — no commitment, just a map — pull it up at quillus.com and look at your own street. The neighborhood is smaller than you think, and it's watching.