Open Data Portal Downloading

What is a Business Improvement District?

According to the City Clerk of the City of Los Angeles,

A business improvement district is a geographically defined area within the City of Los Angeles, in which services, activities and programs are paid for through a special assessment which is charged to all members within the district in order to equitably distribute the benefits received and the costs incurred to provide the agreed-upon services, activities and programs. The assessment money is collected by the City or by the County through a special contractual arrangement with the city. Because the assessment funds collected in a given district cannot legally be spent outside of that BID, the City creates a trust fund for each BID, with funds periodically released to support operations. (City Clerk Website)

Where can I find them?

The geodata on Business Improvement Districts can be found on the City of Los Angeles Data Portal.

Steps to download and convert to web ready file

• Goto the City of Los Angeles Data Portal and scroll down to the search bar and type "Business Improvement Districts".
• 
• You will see the results
• .
• This link is the one we want to click on, the icon "LA DCP" stands for LA Department of City Planning
• 
• Sometimes during your searches you will find these links with the filter icon. They are made by user's like yourself to find specific results by linking datasets together on the data portal. With an account you can make such requests and save them for anyone to use.
• 
• Clicking on the top link will give you this result. It's an interactive map, you can go ahead and explore.
• 
• Now we need to export it.
• In the upper right corner click on the "EXPORT" tab and export to a "SHAPEFILE", it will download as a zip file.
• Download the file to a location of your choice
• If you open the zip file you will notice that it will contain about 4-7 files, all with the same name but with different extensions like .shp .prj .dbf, all these files are needed for the data to produce the map you just saw on the data portal, but these are hard to keep track of when you have multiple layers on a map, especially if we are going to make a webmap. So we're gonna convert these files into one, its called a geojson
• 
• Ok so lets load it up on QGIS! Fire up the program