[Q] site to feature distances?

[Charles E Meier]

I have a site file w/ 10,000+ sites representing locations where a home has 
been sold between 1991-1993.  This was extracted from a data set which lists 
each homes location, sale price, size of house, size of lot, number of 
bedrooms, etc.

I'd like to use grass to figure out how far each home is from the nearest
raster cell which contains a feature which might influence the home's sale 
price.  Basically, I want to know how far each of my homes are from the 
nearest stream or lake, railroad, industrial site, etc.

I need to extract this info for each house and add it to the other variables 
in the data set.  I'll then use a statistics program to regress sale price on
the set of variables to see how location influences the price for which homes 
sell.  This will be used to calculate Hicksian consumer surpluses for 
willingness to pay to avoid noise pollution, industrial ugliness, etc. based on
house sale price differentials.

Is there an easy way to extract this info in grass?  I'm running grass on a 
linux system in case that makes a difference.

Thanks for any help!

BTW, I tried posting this to the USENET info.grass.user newsgroup, but it 
never showed up.  I've been able to do this in the past, but it doesn't seem 
to work now.  Anyone else having problems or should I moan to my local 
sysadmin?  This message was e-mailed to grassu-list at moon.cecer.army.mil.

+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
*                 Charles E. Meier        <Meier.1 at osu.edu>                   *
*                                                                             *
*   - "You can learn a lot from listening to people talk.  Why everything I   *
*   know today I've learned from listening to myself talk about things that   *
*   I knew absolutely nothing about." - Gracie Allen                          *
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+