Exploration 1 | LA City Owned Properties

Exploration 1 | "Does my street have empty government-owned lots?"

This is a exploration with different paths on finding the vacant lots owned by the City of Los Angeles. The intent is that you, the citizen, can learn how use open-source software and data to answer the questions of your neighborhood and city. Each path is broken down by steps, you don't necessarily have to do all the steps, you can jump to one that interests you.

Here you will learn how to:

• Use the open data portals offered by the City of Los Angeles and Los Angeles County
• Create an account where you will be able to filter data and save those view for future reference or download.
• Use open source GIS (Geograhic Information System) software like QGIS
• Data downloaded from the portals can be viewed spatially on a map for further analysis
• Data will be filtered further using expressions (expressions are a set of functions that search for specific results, say looking for the locations of a list of pizza restuarants only with the name "Dominoes")
• Linking your dataset with another with matching fields (say your new list of dominoes locations has a location number unique to each location, and you have another dataset with the same set of numbers but this set has more information on the number of pizza's sold. You can link the two datasets together to share the information between them)
• Using Spatial Query to find features within features
• Saving your dataset into a web-friendly format like GEOJSON
• Creating a simple webmap with
• Leaflet
• geojson.io
• Mapbox Studio
• Mapbox.JS
• How to host your map on github with leaflet, geojson.io, mapbox.js

Open Data Portals

First things first, lets get some data!

There are two open data portals available on LA