The everything index.
What is a town worth?

1. Start with a pen

How many BIC pens are within 25 miles of where you’re sitting? Nobody knows. But you can get close. Los Angeles County has 3,416,449 households (U.S. Census Bureau QuickFacts, Los Angeles County). Say each kitchen drawer holds 20 pens. Add 10 on every desk for the county’s roughly 1.4 million desk workers. That’s about 82 million pens.

Every one of those numbers is a guess except the households. That’s fine. A guess you write down can be corrected. A guess you keep in your head can’t.

2. A price has two sides

What is a used pen worth? Ask two people. The one holding it says a nickel. The one who wants it says nothing, because pens are free at every bank. Those are a bid and an ask. The truth sits between them, and it only shows up when both sides speak.

A toaster works the same way. The Goodwill value guide asks $2.99. Our opening bid is a dollar. Somewhere in between, a neighbor will actually hand one over.

3. Count the containers

A town is a set of containers: homes, offices, garages, yards. El Segundo’s office market is 18.3 million square feet, 16.9% of it empty (Kidder Mathews, Los Angeles office market, 2Q 2026). At 165 square feet a person (JLL Global Occupancy Planning Benchmark Report 2025, via HR Dive (July 22, 2025)), that’s about 92,105 seats, and perhaps 55,263 cubicles. Used, those cubicles are worth $17.7 million to $49.7 million.

4. Some things are never for sale

The Postal Service paid about $59,600 a truck for its new delivery vehicles (Reason, “10 Years and $3 Billion for a New Mail Truck?” (Sept 13, 2024)). At one truck per 300 households, roughly 11,400 serve this area, $679 million of public property. An index can count it. A market shouldn’t trade it. Knowing the difference is the most important part of the method.

5. Your turn

Here is the whole method, written so you can copy it for your own town:

1. Draw the circle. Pick a center and a radius. Ours is 25 miles from El Segundo City Hall. The county (3,416,449 households, 3,987,736 jobs, from Census QuickFacts) stands in for it.
2. Count the containers. Households hold most things. Offices hold the rest. We count desk jobs as 35% of all jobs, an assumption you can change.
3. Guess what each one holds. Twenty pens in a kitchen drawer, eight pairs of shoes, one sofa. Write each guess down as a guess.
4. Price it used. Thrift value guides publish a low and a high for ordinary things. Low is the bid, high is the ask.
5. Price it new. Read a few store pages on one day and keep the date. The cheapest per unit is the new ask.
6. Open the book. Let neighbors post what they would pay or take. When real quotes land, they move the mark and the guesses fade.

Everything else is arithmetic. Units on hand = (per household × households) + (per worker × desk workers). Value = units × the midpoint of bid and ask. Our whole model is one file, catalog.json: copy it, change the numbers to your town’s, and you have your own index.

Open the everything index →