The goal of this site is to allow anyone to quickly browse, download and reuse dozens of different maps covering Southern California.
On the homepage, pick any point in the region. You’ll get back a list of areas it falls within, drawn from dozens of public datasets our team has compiled. The list includes U.S. Census tracts, city boundaries, political districts, police and fire jurisdictions, school zones and the L.A. County neighborhoods assembled, in partnership with Times readers, as part of our Mapping L.A. project.
You can then download any of those individual shapes in GeoJSON, KML and SHP formats. You can also download entire boundary sets like, for instance, the LAPD’s 169 Basic Car Areas.
Besides quick lookups and downloads—good when you need to pull a fact for a story or gather the raw materials for a simple graphic—the site is equipped with an API that allows programmers to write code that interacts with the database. For instance, you could submit a list of dozens of addresses and get back the City Council district they fall within.
This project was inspired by similar sites for Chicago, Oklahoma, Canada and New York City.
It is powered by a modified version of django-boundaryservice, an excellent open-source project developed by the Chicago Tribune’s News Applications Team. We contributed a series of improvements to the codebase.
The site is maintanied by the staff of the Los Angeles Times Data Desk. If you have an questions, problems or suggestions for additions please contact datadesk@latimes.com.