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New York City Zoning live on the street

Submitted by lovebuck on 19 November 2008 - 4:53pm to Discussions.

I am imagining a mobile app that lets you walk around NYC, and letting your device use your location, display zoning information for the building lot(s) at the address or location.

Developers already walk around the city, investigating under-developed sites and (when the market is right) calculating total square footage allowed under zoning.

I don't know if zoning information has been coded with addresses in any public data source.

But this could be useful for a lot of people. Would be interested to hear from local NYC tech folks who might have thought any of this through?

19 Nov21:54

Re: live zoning app

By John Geraci

Totally interesting, because the idea is so novel to me.

Anyone know if this info is publicly available anywhere? If so, it would be pretty easy to work it into a mobile app.

20 Nov14:44

Building a Zoning App

By John Geraci

Lovebuck - just stumbled across this surfing through the blogosphere: http://spatialdistillery.com/?p=26

Why don't you reach out to them and work together on building this app?

If you do, update DIYcity with details, and post the final results to the site.

20 Nov16:33

re: live zoning app

By nickyg

Hey John,

Yeah, the spatial distillery is a covert sub project of the Open Planning Project -- we have a few guys who are keen to start making cool mapping and mobile apps. Already today we've been trying to track down some publicly available zoning shape files.

Also, the iPhone is not only geo-aware but also direction-aware (better term for this?). Anyway, it knows which way you're facing, so it could potentially get even more detailed than that -- information about specific buildings, etc. Could maybe hook into everyblock.com's data...

20 Nov17:08

This links to NYC DCP

By lovebuck

This links to NYC DCP products. Looks like the "Pluto" product might have a table linking addresses with zoning districts, overlays, etc.

http://www.nyc.gov/html/dcp/html/bytes/applbyte.shtml#data

I agree that the direction-based capabilities of the iPhone might allow more specific building info to be mapped. It would be amazing if you could instantly determine how under-/over-built a certain building is-given its base FAR. This would require the addition of the existing gross SF field.

20 Nov17:18

live zoning app and directionally aware mobile devices

By John Geraci

Hey Nick - interesting idea. check out wikitude if you haven't yet - that would make for a really nice live zoning app.

http://bit.ly/72Vu

20 Nov17:29

PLUTO is exactly what you need for this

By Anonymous

Hey guys,

The PLUTO data set combined with the tax lot geographic data set (which is what NYCDCP's MapPLUTO product is) is exactly what you'd need to make this work.

I developed Ride the City (http://www.ridethecity.com) and I'd be happy to help out if you need it.

Thanks,
Jordan

24 Nov16:46

NYC Zoning Maps

By ashleyowl

Here is where all of the updates to the zoning maps occur first:

http://www.nyc.gov/html/dcp/html/zone/zh_zmaptable.shtml

Very confusing, but it's the most accurate source.

25 Nov17:50

Building This Zoning App

By John Geraci

So I'm just wondering - how much work would it be, start to finish, to build this app? Anyone have that info?

(you should be able to reply to this message from your email, by just hitting 'reply').

25 Nov18:00

Re: Building This Zoning App

By John Geraci

>> Anyone have that info?Or not "anyone have that info" but rather anyone want to make a rough ballpark guess?

25 Nov19:00

Re: Re: Building This Zoning App

By Jordan

I can come up with a pretty good estimate for the development of a
basic API that returns a tax lot, and its building/zoning information
if given either an address or a longitude/latitude. I could do this in
about 6 hours (and can do it over the weekend using PLUTO data from a
couple years back).

I have no idea what the iPhone development effort would be. The
simplest iPhone application could be fairly straightforward:

1. Get current location via GPS or allow user to enter address;
2. Send current location or address to PLUTOlookup API via HTTP request; and
3. Parse returned XML and display results.

I dunno. For someone who knows what they are doing, maybe 20 hours?

26 Nov19:28

re: building this zoning app

By John Geraci

So, 6 hours for an API, plus 20 hours for the iPhone app, very roughly.

If I rounded up some money to pay for development of this, would anyone want to do it?

Just thinking out loud here...

26 Nov20:00

Re: re: building this zoning app

By Jordan

No need to pay for the web service/API development. I'll whip it up
over the weekend using MAP PLUTO data that's a couple of years old.
Once it's running, If you're able to spring for the latest data from
the NYC Department of City Planning for a refresh, that would be
great.

27 Nov04:02

re: building the zoning app

By John Geraci

>> No need to pay for the web service/API development.
>>I'll whip it up over the weekend using
>>MAP PLUTO data that's a couple of years old.

Great - go ahead and build the API, and I'll figure out where the money will come from for the fresh data. We'll get it one way or another.

01 Dec18:33

Another set of free map data

By nickyg

Another set of free map data which I was just pointed to is OASIS -- http://www.oasisnyc.net/ -- big alliance of public, nonprofit and community groups working to produce free public data about open spaces in NYC.

01 Dec19:49

NYC land use and zoning web service

By Jordan

Hi all,

I put together a quick web service for querying zoning/land use information in New York City over the weekend. You can either pass a street address or longitude/latitude pair and it will return data for the 10 closest tax lots as an XML document. (And if you pass a street address, it will attempt to match the address on the PLUTO record and send that as the first record.)

Here's the link to the web service: http://209.123.234.190/pluto/

If you go there, it will tell you how to call it. Here are a couple of examples:
http://209.123.234.190/pluto/?address=29-19%2024th%20Avenue,%20Astoria,%...

http://209.123.234.190/pluto/?point=-74.013274%2040.704878 (this is the lon/lat for 2 Broadway in Manhattan)

All it's doing is querying a postgreSQL/PostGIS database using a PHP script. The performance is noteworthy given there are more than 700,000 records in the PLUTO database.

If anyone is interested in developing an iPhone application and has some special format requirements or questions, please let me know. It should be fairly straightforward to at least make an iPhone-friendly web site using iUI (http://code.google.com/p/iui/), but it wouldn't make use of the IPhone's GPS.

01 Dec20:15

Hey, Jordan - This is

By whitneymcn

Hey, Jordan -

This is excellent -- nice work!

02 Dec08:35

Great, Jordan - so what has

By John Geraci

Great, Jordan - so what has to happen next? Is the data current, or do we need to figure out how to get that?

02 Dec17:00

Re: Great, Jordan - so what has

By Jordan

The data is from 2005. Most of it will still be current, but with all
the rezonings during the past few years, there are probably several
hundred blocks (and many more lots) that are a little different now.
It looks like the latest PLUTO data available to the public is from
March 2008 so even that's going to be slightly stale.

I don't think there's any hurry to refresh the data, but I would be
interested in supporting anyone who would like to take a crack at
integrating this service into an iPhone app (or into a web
application).

02 Dec17:39

Jordan, I am the original

By Anonymous

Jordan,
I am the original poster "lovebuck" and appreciate you taking time to work on this. I am not a experienced in building apps; rather an urban planner who is interested in making this and other ideas a reality.

If you think there is something I can contribute--real world usability, testing, new ideas--let me know. I would also help pool financial resources if we wanted to pay someone to integrate your work into an iPhone app.

contact me directly me: g.bronsonfox@gmail.com

03 Dec23:05

Re: Re: Great, Jordan - so what has

By Rolando Peñate

This is great Jordan, thanks for all your efforts!

Ivan over at Spatial Distillery started working on the front-end mapping portion of this last week but gave up after discovering that the PLUTO data was hard to come by. We're having a little hack session tomorrow and this stuff is definitely on the table for us to work on.

—R

05 Dec19:35

Building the front-end using Phonegap?

By Anonymous

I'd be happy to take a shot at the iPhone app using a mix of iPhone native code and web-based AJAX using the Phonegap approach I just blogged about here (wrapping mobile web apps in a native shell).

http://openideals.com/2008/12/05/turn-your-blog-into-a-native-iphone-app...

I think this would reduce the 20 hours of development to something more in the 10-15 range perhaps.

05 Dec19:38

Check out Phonegap.com

By Anonymous

Phonegap allows for web-based development on iPhone, Android and Blackberry wrapped in a native shell so you can get access to GPS coords via Javascript.

This is purely just an endorsement based on my fondness for this clever hack. I am in no way paid by or associated with Phonegap! ;)

contact me via: nathan at freitas dot net

05 Dec20:00

Re: Building the front-end using Phonegap?

By Jordan

That's great. I don't know if you read Rolando Peñate's comment that
the Spatial Distillery guys are taking a look at this, too.

http://spatialdistillery.com/

I'm happy to adjust the web service for anyone who is working on an
iPhone or other client. Just let me know what you need.

Jordan

10 Dec15:06

re: building the front end

By John Geraci

hey all - any update on this? is a front end in the works from spatialdistillery? is phonegap the solution?