What a fantastic post! I am a neighborhood guru, as mapping subdivisions is part of my job description at Baltimore County Government. i have several years experience mapping neighborhoods in the legal sense in an ESRI GIS environment, and have translated some of that to OSM in my spare time. When our data goes CC0, I'm going to look into making an 'imagery' layer of plat outlines so that people can trace them if they want.
A few quick points (some are not unique): * Neighborhood can mean a fluid place OR a platted subdivision with defined legal boundaries. I find the former to be the case in cities where land was not conveyed by plat in 1600-1900s, but rather by deed or some other asinine instrument. The large tracts that became city neighborhoods don't tend to have a definitive plat thus people come up with their own names. Meanwhile, the latter is generally the case in suburbs, especially the ones that sprang up after WW2. By then, plats were the requirement, not just the norm, and developers thought of cute names like 'Placid Acres' which stuck with the community. HOAs reinforce this. * place=neighborhood vs place=hamlet: The TIGER import as I understand it uses the place=hamlet (silly british name). PLACE=NEIGHBORHOOD IS NOT RENDERED (https://trac.openstreetmap.org/ticket/4191) and thus I haven't changed place=hamlets to neighborhood here. Hamlet has no meaning in Baltimore except perhaps where Robin Hood might live. * It makes sense that Zillow has the good data because real estate is all about location, and everyone wants to be in the desirable 'neighborhood.' Many of these boundaries are set by govs. People don't always agree, and new buyers may find themselves on the 'wrong side of the tracks' despite the listing being in the good area. That's all for now. -Elliott ----- http://about.me/elliottp | http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/ElliottPlack -- View this message in context: http://gis.19327.n5.nabble.com/Neighborhoods-Zillow-tp5764954p5765851.html Sent from the USA mailing list archive at Nabble.com. _______________________________________________ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
