Mapping L.A. Boundaries API

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.