[Talk-us] finding city boundary info?

[Michael Patrick]

> > I guess I was expecting that TIGER lines for these boundaries would have
> > already been imported at some time. But, no. I will have to find out why
> > TIGER data imports were not done for this area.
>

TIGER is intended to support the US Census, and the geographic information
of the census is all about statistical areas. Some of the designators,
terms, field names may be the same as those in common use ( or OSM ), but
that is usually not the case. Admin areas may loosely coincide between a
local government's boundary and the Census, but not necessarily so (
Example here:
https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/geography/guidance/geo-areas/usps_census_city.html
). For example, in my area, there have been many annexations and
incorporations of unincorporated county areas between the decennial census.
More about the different flavors of TIGER here
https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/geography/guidance/tiger-data-products-guide.html
and
https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/geography/guidance/geo-identifiers.html

Also, USPS 'cities' are not the same as the civil admin areas of a city. So
the best source, if to start at the bottom and work up. Search the city
level's web site for 'GIS' or look under the different departments to see
if they post their data for download. Sometimes they do this from their web
map. It might be the planning department, or the engineering department, or
the IT department. If they don't do the same at the county level, and then
eventually the state level.

>From the state geo portal:
https://gis.data.ca.gov/datasets/CALFIRE-Forestry::california-incorporated-cities-1?geometry=-115.387%2C33.506%2C-114.138%2C33.706
" Complete accounting of all incorporated cities, including the boundary
and name of each individual city. Since 2009, this process includes digital
capture of every annexation as they are sent to CAL FIRE from the state
Board of Equalization.( i.e. read as 'tax *administration*', so they have
an economic interest in keeping this up to date as possible, as do the
emergency responders ) " last updated  9/13/2019
[image: image.png]


>From https://tigerweb.geo.census.gov/tigerweb/
[image: image.png]




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