Out of curiosity, I wondered what sort of data my home county (Salt Lake County) kept and if I could get access to it.
It was easy to find... but apparently will cost me $1000 dollars to access it...
Perhaps I don't understand exactly how the Assessor's office works, but it seems pretty wrong that public data from an organization funded by taxpayers isn't freely available for download.
The article doesn't mention it, but it looks like LA County charges as well.
I started a company that works extensively with geospatial data and I often interact with cities from across the country (https://angel.co/civic-insight). Learning how to get access to government data was probably one of most challenging parts of starting up, but I've seen a significant evolution in the thinking of governments in the past few years.
I was a Code for America Fellow in 2012 (I am still heavily involved in the space) and back then any talk of publishing datasets, shapefiles or having "APIs" was thought to be an exotic topic reserved for fancy cities with large budgets like San Francisco and Boston. It was something that smaller cities would love to have but don't have the resources to do anything about it.
But that's not the case anymore. Even a lot of the smaller cities now understand that opening up now gives them access to a new ecosystem of tools and technologies that are rapidly developing.
It depends. Taxpayer dollars may only barely cover the cost of getting the data together, but distributing it could be fairly significant as a budgetary item. To cover that cost they may just charge some fee that has several uses:
- Keep taxes down and only support people who really have a serious need for it
- Cover the cost of packaging and distribution (and other associated costs)
I don't necessarily agree with this, but these are the kinds of justifications that are generally tossed around inside the government about these kinds of things.
A group from Code For America came to my town recently (Tempe, AZ) and they address a lot of the issues with access to public data. Was really glad to see things like this exist. http://www.codeforamerica.org
$1000 doesn't sound expensive to me, for the first request. Somebody has to think about the question whether there is confidential or copyrighted information in there, somebody has to to write a decent disclaimer, think about any security implications, etc.
Having said that, a government nowadays should have an open data policy. You shouldn't need to make a freedom of information request for 'bureacratic' data.
Also, any 'for the people' government should allow the free download of such information, and 'the people' should realize that that costs some money. That, I think, is a problem in the USA, from both sides.
> it seems pretty wrong that public data from an organization funded by taxpayers isn't freely available for download.
One really nice thing about the USA is how much public and open data there is. In Europe you can't even get access to maps, which is why OSM was created in Europe.
The interesting thing with charges like this is that they tend to be decided by one person. (in the case of things like court fees and record access, Clerks of Court often ignore state mandates, because they can) The easiest way to fix this might be to make an issue of this the next time the County Assessor has an election. Which might cost more than $1000, but if it were your main business...
my previous county listed lots, primary owner, and assessed value, when they first went live many years ago. Since then I think they only removed the owner's name; it usually was just last name.
why was it important, having someone who you don't want contact with could determine your home and possible income simply by searching the county tax records.
>Perhaps I don't understand exactly how the Assessor's office works, but it seems pretty wrong that public data from an organization funded by taxpayers isn't freely available for download.
Hear, hear!
I have looked at various online records offices for various properties located in cities across the USA and most every single one was a horrifyingly slow, blast from the past type experience. I'm talking minutes for basic queries to complete. And expensive to boot. Usually $5 to $10 per query.
> Perhaps I don't understand exactly how the Assessor's office works, but it seems pretty wrong that public data from an organization funded by taxpayers isn't freely available for download.
I think those costs are there because the provision of that data is considered above and beyond the mandate of the Assessor's Office.
>>public data from an organization funded by taxpayers isn't freely available
Perhaps it was free, they wouldn't have resources to compile it? Plenty of things that tax payer money supports aren't free, for example suburban swimming pools or perhaps more egregiously sports venues.
Whoa. That escalated fast. I thought I was reading an simple article about property data. And then, BOOM! All the sudden we're discussing file formats, and then making database queries. And out of nowhere this monster appears: http://robrhinehart.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/spherical...
That equation is rather unnecessary showing off, I don't see it being used later on, and the author doesn't bother trying to explain it. It looks like (going by the GM/r) that it might be the gravitational potential for a mass distribution described by a bunch of spherical harmonics.
And immediately preceding that equation is this sentence:
"If it sounds simple, it is not, but if you’re interested it’s a great reason to learn spherical harmonics."
The entire point of showing off that equation is to say "This stuff is actually really deep and complicated and it's a rich subject to dive into on its own if you want to go for that, but I'm not going that route."
I have the firm belief that Los Angeles is actually the largest city by population in the USA (as opposed to NYC). Due to an accident of history, what people colloquially call "LA" is still divided politically into something like 80 independent cities. New York City consolidated into the five boroughs in the late 19th century, prior to that Queens, Brooklyn, etc. were separate cities. If you look at the city borders of official Los Angeles, it's a complex mapping of the spaces around and in-between the various independent cities.
In most of the US, unincorporated land is extremely rural. In LA, "unincorporated" land blends seamlessly into the urban landscape. Often if you're in an unfamiliar area you can't tell what "city" you're in without looking at the street signs.
While not 100% of LA county residents can be counted as living in "LA", it's a close-enough approximation. ~10 million vs NYC's 8 million.
If you're going to include all that into LA, shouldn't NYC lay claim to Yonkers, Jersey City, and dozens of other places? The New York metropolitan area is certainly larger than the Los Angeles metropolitan area, and I'd wager that there's no circle of radius R in the US, for R between 1 mile and 1000 miles, that contains more people than one centered appropriately on lower Manhattan.
It's amusing -- in Australia we list cities populations like this by default. I never consider the population of Melbourne to just be the area covered by Melbourne City Council - it has always included the greater metro area.
If you're going to go down that route, you'd also have to consider sections of NJ and Westchester County. The density of say, Jersey City is 16,736.6/sq mi. There's the Hudson River in between, but so what?
Greater NYC still includes a lot of very dense conurbation well beyond the city limits. For example, some of the densest cities in the US are those in Hudson County, NJ, and some of the suburban downtowns (for example, White Plains) have skylines that rival midsized Midwestern cities. Newark, though down at its heels, is linked to NYC by a 35-minute rapid transit trip at 10-minute headways, the commuter rail network is even more extensive than that, and bus commuters come to NYC from Allentown and the Poconos in Pennsylvania.
You can't just count an entire massive county as 'LA' while cutting off NYC at its city limits. The stub-ends of the subway lines at the Bronx border are dramatic, but the city doesn't just end anywhere— I wouldn't be shocked to see the subway extended beyond NYC at some point.
An interesting bit of naivete from Rob Rhinehart here:
Most, if not all, counties use GIS (geographic information systems) to maintain this data
Most people have no idea how appallingly corrupt, backward, wrong, inaccurate, inefficient, unjust, etc. etc. record keeping and government in general can be at the county level in some places. For the purpose of brevity let's put it this way: some counties maintain a poor paper trail, deliberately. Those counties also tend to be poor, so you might just assume they cannot afford better systems, but sometimes there is a bit more than that going on.
I actually think it would interesting to know how many counties make use of GIS.
#1 Children's Hospital Los Angeles: Non-profit teaching hospital.
#2 Kaiser Foundation Hospitals: Non-profit hospital
#3 Cedars-Sinai Medical Center: Non-profit hospital
Are non-profit hospitals property-tax exempt? I know non-profits normally aren't, but there are exceptions (e.g., low-income student housing co-ops in Texas).
Yes. You pay taxes on profits. Since a non-profit entity makes no profit, it pays no taxes.
The bigger issue I come across is whether a donation to a non-profit organization is tax deductible. For that, the non-profit entity must apply to the IRS for IRC 501(c)(3) status and receive it before a donation to a non-profit entity is tax deductible.
That table of most expensive cities is interesting. Given how Proposition 13 works, the assessed value of places in various cities might be more a reflection of how actively things are turning over than how much they are actually worth. The old house we rent in Manhattan Beach has an assessed value of like $88,000 since the landlord has owned it forever but if we bought it the value would jump to like $1.7 million. It would be cool to integrate this data with estimated house values from Zillow to see how much that skew is per city.
You could just to a bileaner filtered surface over recently sold houses in your town to more or less fake the same result. Just subtract the assessed value from the height of the approximate surface.
Fascinating article. I'm no GIS wonk, but I've moved in real estate circles for a while and understand how messy (truly truly messy) property data can be. If Rob wants parcel data across the country, he can pay for it, otherwise its a standartization nightmare.
I also love that this is a subtle pitch for a chief database architect (with 3-5 years of experience(?)).
I've built GIS databases w/ parcel data, owner data, tax data and zoning layers of high growth Virgnia and North Carolina jurisdiction. It's a very time consuming and ad hoc process. Some jurisdictions charge a lot of money for this data. If anyone has any interest in exploring a parcel based CRM startup concept, contact me. There is a lot of demand for this service. I have a few paying consulting customers and thinking about building it into a SaaS tool to power real estate development.
It shows that long term planning will indeed win out in the long term.
Meaning, if the extremist privatization politicians got their way, the gov't would own zero. But, if the gov't holds the commons in receivership over a very long term, the commons (as the gov't is ours if done well) will still hold a strong position over time.
I heard the largest landholder, once you strip back the entities, is actually the Church of Scientology. Maybe that was just hearsay, or only visible in Hollywood, where it's almost certainly true.
Your statement, which is just accepting an internet-rumor as true, contrasts very strongly with the article itself, which is about going to great effort to learn things from hard data.
[+] [-] addisonj|11 years ago|reply
It was easy to find... but apparently will cost me $1000 dollars to access it...
Perhaps I don't understand exactly how the Assessor's office works, but it seems pretty wrong that public data from an organization funded by taxpayers isn't freely available for download.
The article doesn't mention it, but it looks like LA County charges as well.
[+] [-] eddietejeda|11 years ago|reply
I was a Code for America Fellow in 2012 (I am still heavily involved in the space) and back then any talk of publishing datasets, shapefiles or having "APIs" was thought to be an exotic topic reserved for fancy cities with large budgets like San Francisco and Boston. It was something that smaller cities would love to have but don't have the resources to do anything about it.
But that's not the case anymore. Even a lot of the smaller cities now understand that opening up now gives them access to a new ecosystem of tools and technologies that are rapidly developing.
Hence, our startup.
Also, the California Supreme Court ruled that Shapefiles must be made available to the public at almost no cost. See summary of case here: http://www.ocregister.com/taxdollars/county-519947-landbase-...
Oh, and when it comes to SLC. Here ya go:
http://gis.utah.gov/data/sgid-cadastre/parcels/
ftp://ftp.agrc.utah.gov/UtahSGID_Vector/UTM12_NAD83/CADASTRE/UnpackagedData/Parcels_SaltLake/
[+] [-] bane|11 years ago|reply
- Keep taxes down and only support people who really have a serious need for it
- Cover the cost of packaging and distribution (and other associated costs)
I don't necessarily agree with this, but these are the kinds of justifications that are generally tossed around inside the government about these kinds of things.
[+] [-] alexisnorman|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Someone|11 years ago|reply
Having said that, a government nowadays should have an open data policy. You shouldn't need to make a freedom of information request for 'bureacratic' data.
Also, any 'for the people' government should allow the free download of such information, and 'the people' should realize that that costs some money. That, I think, is a problem in the USA, from both sides.
[+] [-] rmc|11 years ago|reply
One really nice thing about the USA is how much public and open data there is. In Europe you can't even get access to maps, which is why OSM was created in Europe.
[+] [-] justin66|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Shivetya|11 years ago|reply
why was it important, having someone who you don't want contact with could determine your home and possible income simply by searching the county tax records.
[+] [-] GigabyteCoin|11 years ago|reply
Hear, hear!
I have looked at various online records offices for various properties located in cities across the USA and most every single one was a horrifyingly slow, blast from the past type experience. I'm talking minutes for basic queries to complete. And expensive to boot. Usually $5 to $10 per query.
[+] [-] saraid216|11 years ago|reply
I think those costs are there because the provision of that data is considered above and beyond the mandate of the Assessor's Office.
[+] [-] frozenport|11 years ago|reply
Perhaps it was free, they wouldn't have resources to compile it? Plenty of things that tax payer money supports aren't free, for example suburban swimming pools or perhaps more egregiously sports venues.
[+] [-] dba7dba|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chicofarm|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] choward|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tfgg|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] saraid216|11 years ago|reply
"If it sounds simple, it is not, but if you’re interested it’s a great reason to learn spherical harmonics."
The entire point of showing off that equation is to say "This stuff is actually really deep and complicated and it's a rich subject to dive into on its own if you want to go for that, but I'm not going that route."
[+] [-] zerocrates|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gxs|11 years ago|reply
Loved seeing the queries and results, along with the commentary.
I am a product manager now, but I miss the days when I was analyst and would put similar queries together to drive various business decisions.
I've bookmarked the site to look for interesting content in the future.
Also, would love to see a similar analysis for the bay area.
[+] [-] prawn|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bkeroack|11 years ago|reply
I have the firm belief that Los Angeles is actually the largest city by population in the USA (as opposed to NYC). Due to an accident of history, what people colloquially call "LA" is still divided politically into something like 80 independent cities. New York City consolidated into the five boroughs in the late 19th century, prior to that Queens, Brooklyn, etc. were separate cities. If you look at the city borders of official Los Angeles, it's a complex mapping of the spaces around and in-between the various independent cities.
In most of the US, unincorporated land is extremely rural. In LA, "unincorporated" land blends seamlessly into the urban landscape. Often if you're in an unfamiliar area you can't tell what "city" you're in without looking at the street signs.
While not 100% of LA county residents can be counted as living in "LA", it's a close-enough approximation. ~10 million vs NYC's 8 million.
[+] [-] jessriedel|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whatusername|11 years ago|reply
Lists NY as ~23 million, LA as ~18 million.
It's amusing -- in Australia we list cities populations like this by default. I never consider the population of Melbourne to just be the area covered by Melbourne City Council - it has always included the greater metro area.
[+] [-] xxpor|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] akgerber|11 years ago|reply
You can't just count an entire massive county as 'LA' while cutting off NYC at its city limits. The stub-ends of the subway lines at the Bronx border are dramatic, but the city doesn't just end anywhere— I wouldn't be shocked to see the subway extended beyond NYC at some point.
[+] [-] justin66|11 years ago|reply
Most, if not all, counties use GIS (geographic information systems) to maintain this data
Most people have no idea how appallingly corrupt, backward, wrong, inaccurate, inefficient, unjust, etc. etc. record keeping and government in general can be at the county level in some places. For the purpose of brevity let's put it this way: some counties maintain a poor paper trail, deliberately. Those counties also tend to be poor, so you might just assume they cannot afford better systems, but sometimes there is a bit more than that going on.
I actually think it would interesting to know how many counties make use of GIS.
[+] [-] madeofpalk|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lurcio|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lkbm|11 years ago|reply
#2 Kaiser Foundation Hospitals: Non-profit hospital
#3 Cedars-Sinai Medical Center: Non-profit hospital
Are non-profit hospitals property-tax exempt? I know non-profits normally aren't, but there are exceptions (e.g., low-income student housing co-ops in Texas).
[+] [-] zorpner|11 years ago|reply
There are a number of conditions that must be met for exemption, and being a non-profit hospital generally fulfills them.
[+] [-] jnosCo|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joshuaheard|11 years ago|reply
The bigger issue I come across is whether a donation to a non-profit organization is tax deductible. For that, the non-profit entity must apply to the IRS for IRC 501(c)(3) status and receive it before a donation to a non-profit entity is tax deductible.
[+] [-] caycep|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pavel_lishin|11 years ago|reply
I really wonder what those folks are up to today.
[+] [-] slackpad|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thrownaway2424|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mooreds|11 years ago|reply
I also love that this is a subtle pitch for a chief database architect (with 3-5 years of experience(?)).
[+] [-] jkot|11 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Sutter
[+] [-] greeneggs|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kylered|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johnvschmitt|11 years ago|reply
Meaning, if the extremist privatization politicians got their way, the gov't would own zero. But, if the gov't holds the commons in receivership over a very long term, the commons (as the gov't is ours if done well) will still hold a strong position over time.
[+] [-] wallaceowen|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 72deluxe|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] antidaily|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kylek|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] contingencies|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cmsmith|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikey_p|11 years ago|reply