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Even the BRA can't get maps of Boston neighborhoods right
By adamg on Mon, 08/16/2010 - 1:41pm
It'd be pretty laughable, except it turns out other city agencies and non-profit groups have been using the maps for years for planning purposes, the Jamaica Plain Gazette reports:
"Jamaica Plain" on the BRA map includes almost all of Mission Hill, but not the Forest Hills, Woodbourne, Parkside, Brookside and Egleston Square areas. According to the map, the local E-13 Police Station and the Jamaica Plain Neighborhood Development Corporation are not in JP, but Mission Hill's Mission Church is.
Neighborhoods:
Free tagging:
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Comments
The Gazette has been
The Gazette has been pestering the BRA about this for a couple of years now.
So the 'best informed' about all things Boston don't know Mission Hill from Jamaica Plain, and have to be told? That pretty well sums up the state of Boston today.
Such divisions will never match exactly
The BRA made a map with regions that roughly (but not exactly) correspond to neighborhoods. One region that overlaps with much of JP was labeled "Jamaica Plain Planning District" instead of "Planning District covering an arbitrary region that happens to overlap with much of Jamaica Plain but is not actually Jamaica Plain and is not intended to be Jamaica Plain". Probably this is because the former name is shorter and ordinary human beings would not be confused by the difference.
Why not just use the actual Jamaica Plain as the planning district? Somebody in 1967 had to divvy up the city into a particular number of regions. They're not going to match exactly; you just do the best job you can and move on with your life.
Correct maps
If there are official "correct" neighborhood boundaries, why oh why can't I seem to find a map of these anywhere on the internet? It's been frustrating me for at least a year. Does anybody know where to find a correct map?
Publishing this information might be a useful way to get people to know that it exists!
N'Hood Maps
You can try: http://www.mapjunction.com/bra/
Basically the BRA divides the neighborhoods up into 16 planning districts and that's about as close as the City seems to go near defining the n'hoods. I think they don't want to get into an unending argument with people as to which area is which. But thanks to glories of the interwebs we can have those unending arguments.
(The other divisions worth noting are the census blocks and tracts and the wards and precincts. They more or less will match up with each other and with the boundaries of the planning districts, but not always.)
And a link to the city's site
This page of maps is from August 2008 and includes districts, police districts, city council districts and Zip Codes. Not clear enough to answer all my questions, though.
zoom in
The link I posted above (the map junction site) lets you zoom in so you can see the details. In particular you can bring up the area you are interested in (take, Egleston Square, please >rimshot<) now from the legend on the left you can pick what particular map you want to put up. This is useful for seeing which zip code one side of a street falls into or maybe which City Councilor this side street falls under or which ward/precinct, whatever.
What you'll find is that the outline of any particular "neighborhood" will differ depending on whether you're talking about how DPW sees it or the BRA or the Post Office, whatever. And as it's been noted, when it comes to real estate people those boundaries get fuzzy and elastic indeed.
Completely digressing off-topic: Personally, I find it annoying to see "the West End" creeping back into usage by the people stuck with those apartments sucking Storrow fumes (the "if you lived here" block). The West End was a much loved immigrant neighborhood torn down by assholes who thought they knew better than everyone else. Don't try and paste the name on your sterile, architecturally-challenged buildings as a way to buy past character. You didn't want the West End, you don't get to use the name.
Ugh. The city is doing it
Ugh. The city is doing it now, too? ZIP Codes do not have borders. Period. They are ill-defined sets of points and delivery routes, and can often not be bordered by non-overlapping polygons.
What the City is mapping on that page is ZCTAs.
Everything has a Sienfeld link
"I'll tell you a little secret about zip codes; they're meaningless!"
~Newman
They're not meaningless, I'm
They're not meaningless, I'm not some ZIP code conspiracy theorist. But they're also not big colored blocks that can be overlayed onto a map to define regions. They're points (and occasionally entire roads). And at the borders, they bleed into one another in many, many cases.
It's especially useless if there's an area with no postal delivery, like a big park.
ZCTAs are the Census Bureau's attempt to make ZIP codes into big blocks, but they do NOT correspond fully with ZIP codes. You can't just look at an envelope addressed to you and assume that you are in the ZCTA with the same number.
Minimal subset of polygons
However, Mike, there does exist a minimal set of polygons that encompass nearly all of the "dots" (addresses) that are included in a particular zip code.
The difficulty is only going to lie in deciding what to do with polygons completely surrounded by other polygons. Do you allow the internal polygon to "escape" by putting in a small sliver of polygon to connect it with its neighboring other points, cutting off the continuity of the other zip code points surrounding it. Or do you leave it fully surrounded and just have a few zip codes with multiple disconnected polygons sprinkled among each other like satellite bacterial colonies (one main spot and a bunch of little spots nearby).
The point is that you can draw a polygon to encompass nearly all (if not all) addresses of a specific zip code. I believe these are commonly called "zip code areas". It is time-consuming and heavily manual. The ZCTAs are crap when it comes to accurately defining the appropriate polygons, but that doesn't mean the nature of zip codes makes them innately undefinable.
"Nearly all" the dots, sure.
"Nearly all" the dots, sure. But if we're trying to draw specific borders of a neighborhood, that "nearly all" is the entire point of the exercise. It's the very edge cases, like 02467 (or is it 02167? I don't remember. Chestnut Hill into WRoxbury and Roslindale), and hell, all of Franklin Park, that makes ZIP codes useless for such a task.
Here's a non-Boston example of overlapping ZIP codes, as well. I'm quite sure (almost 100%) that such an example exists somewhere in Boston. So which neighborhood is that red line in? Purple? Or red? Obviously we can sanely say it is part of the Purple neighborhood, so yeah, we can do that "heavily manual(ly)" as you suggest. But that's not really using ZIP codes to define areas, it's using ZIP codes as a starting point.
Washington Post gets in on the act
They start a story about how Deval Patrick's 2010 campaign is a testbed for Obama's 2012 campaign with an anecdote from a Patrick campaign stop in Grove Hall. Which, the Post informs its readers, is "on the edge of Boston."
Grove Hall on a map. That's some edge; why, Grove Hall is only surrounded by the rest of Boston on four sides.
Allston-Brighton
It's a little like asking where the line between Allston and Brighton is. The BRA maps typically don't distinguish between the two. The voting districts draw a line but it doesn't correspond to ZIP codes. And most people have their own opinion.