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...
I absolutely love these top of articles. I went in with no expectations, so I wasn't as upset as other readers about where the article took.
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.
Great article.
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.
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).
For those interested in the 2006-Libertarian-Loving-County story, I found the New York Times story about it: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/25/national/25loving.html?pag...
I really wonder what those folks are up to today.
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.
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 expected story about John Sutter.At some point he owned half of todays California. Then Gold Rush started and all those squatters moved in :-)
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.
Jefferson Starship - they built it out of rock and roll, as I understand it.
Noah Cross.
Masons
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.
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.