NYC has released data for every tax lot in the city. Here is my first look | Hacker News Reader

NYC has released data for every tax lot in the city. Here is my first look

andrewxhill.github.io

102 pointsandrewxhill23 comments

This is really neat.. but please, please give me a back button. A lot of the pictures were gone before they loaded for me on the slow internet I'm using.

Added a back button

Great work!

How did you create the isometric view of building floor counts?

Also, the 'skip' button could be a little more prominent.

skip is bigger now! the iso views are done using mapnik, the tiling library used by CartoDB. So it is just a pretty simple style option, building-height: somevalue

Mapnik describes itself as a mapping application toolkit:

http://mapnik.org

Tiling might not convey that.

Sorry, wrote that at 6am so probably wasn't as specific as I should have been. Thanks for including a link.

Nice! The next question is "How do you make this useful to Commercial Real Estate?" Answer that and you have yourself a business!

Another thing I didnt see (sorry if it already exists) would be something like a table of contents or an index of all the different maps. I think some of them are a lot more interesting than others and skipping multiple maps would be good.

The PLUTO database is fascinating - but it also isn't a new thing - the real development is that the city has finally released it gratis under the open data law.

Sure, you are allowed to redistribute it now too! http://blog.cartodb.com/post/57786792357/pluto-is-back

Great job! Skip should be next?

I avoided it for a long time trying to look for a different way to progress to another page. After two screens and slow load times (my connection, I'd bet), I bailed confused and hoped to find more info here in the comments.

Yes, it should be labeled 'next', not 'skip.' 'Skip' suggests you go to the end without looking at everything.

Good point, sorry about that... I'll get it fixed later today :)

Well... never mind, easy enough, so I just pushed a fix now

I think the NEXT and BACK words should be right under the body copy as well. I was about to navigate away thinking, "huh neat picture, but I sure wish there was some context," before I noticed the next button buried in the bottom corner of my screen.

Great work on the map and story.

Very nice!Thanks. Would be great to have an index so that 1) I can get an overview of what is available and 2) I can view what interests me instead of going through all the content.

Hey, thanks for the comment! I had originally made this to loop on the wall during a PLUTO party :) so didn't add an index. I'll consider adding it next time I get a moment.

This is very nice. In Denmark we have a country-wide database of buildings with physical data about them (number of floors, square meters, number of units, etc.), and it's gratis-queryable at a small scale through a web interface [1], but to get the data in bulk you have to license it for a lot of money. Would be nice to see it going in the open-data direction.

[1] https://www.ois.dk/

I'll try to scrape it if you want.

I'm currently working on a project to scrape property tax data from every country in the US, and will be providing it for free via a JSON API and with an Openstreetmap mashup for visualization.

This is real good stuff.

One comment, though, why did you use this offensively horrible font? I've never gone in and changed a font style just to use a website

I'm a terrible designer. That is the only reason I have to offer :)

Nice representation of the data.

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