There is an additional layer of smoothing you can do with low-rank smoothers, which not only smooths the data but speeds up the processing because we use less parameters!

The smoothing you can do with location data is really interesting! Similar to penalizing neighboring coefficients in a GAM, you can penalize the difference between neighboring census tracts

This allows us to look at some cool maps like where first time home buyers are buying, and where the most expensive homes are