"A tool for viewing and querying overlapping administrative boundaries"

May 13, 2023 6:24 PM

This is handy if you live in New York City, and a useful example for folks in other areas with lots of different zones, districts, etc.: "The NYC Boundaries Map is a tool for viewing and querying overlapping administrative boundaries in NYC." Give it an address and (example) it'll tell you which districts it's in for 12+ different slices, e.g., police precinct, school district, Community District (which Community Board covers it), legislative districts for city and state representatives, ZIP codes, etc. Source code and a longer prose explanation available on GitHub.
posted by brainwane (4 comments total)

Oh, useful, even though it doesn't include all geographies I use. I also like this description of some NYC geographies, and, as a developer's tool, the nyc-lib library (which, when an address is queried, returns an object just full of geographic information).

I only recently learned that City Council Districts are not the same as nyc's Community Districts. the whole city is an absolutely retched and frustrating clusterfuck of different geographies.
posted by entropone at 5:53 AM on May 14, 2023 [2 favorites]

Neat! I used to do some GIS stuff in NYC and this would have been a great tool to have. You can click on an admin district to see the boundaries. I kind of wish it could show all the overlapping boundaries for a particular address. Which would be a data visualization nightmare, but that’s kind of the point.
posted by Ishbadiddle at 9:15 AM on May 14, 2023

I see you can't easily link to searching for a specific address, but when I search for

370 JAY STREET, Brooklyn, 11201

I get a map that shows me all the boundaries it's in:

Community District 302
Police Precinct 84
Sanitation District BKN02
Fire Battalion 32
School District 13
Health Center District 38
City Council District 33
City Council District (Upcoming 2024) 33
Congressional District 10
State Assembly District 52
State Senate District 26
Neighborhood Tabulation Area DUMBO-Vinegar Hill-Downtown Brooklyn-Boerum Hill
Business Improvement District MetroTech?BID
Zipcode 11201

and when I hover my mouse over any of those items in the left navigation bar, I see the bounded area highlighted in the map.

Ishbadiddle, am I right in understanding that you kind of wish it could show all those overlapping boundaries simultaneously? In which case I agree -- a great point, and hard to do in terms of dataviz legibility.
posted by brainwane at 10:41 AM on May 14, 2023

OpenStates,org does a very useful subset of this in their Find Your Legislator tool, telling you who your elected legislators are, including at the state level. I point people to it every year when our state legislature is in session and I need people to pick up the damn phone and do a little advocacy about some new legislation. Because very few people know who their state legislators are, much less their contact information.

Usage steps that may not be obvious from the web page:
Step 1: go to https://openstates.org/find_your_legislator/
Step 2: enter your zip code (exact address not needed!)
Step 3: KEY STEP: move the map marker on the resulting page to you actual neighborhood / street

Do not skip that last step! The center of your zip code may have different representation from your actual home. Getting within a block (or maybe a mile!) of your house is usually close enough -- you'll see how on the map.
posted by intermod at 3:08 PM on May 14, 2023 [1 favorite]