Converting Geographic Coordinates to New York City neighboorhood names

Question

Does anyone know of a simple tool, method or dataset to enable someone to convert geographic coordinates to New York City neighborhood names?

At the very least, it would be good to map a dataset to the set of neighborhoods.

score 6 · Answer 1 · answered May 16 '14 at 23:21

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tamu has a killer geocoder, as well as a definitive list of other free geocoders. all you have to do is upload your data
http://geoservices.tamu.edu/Services/Geocode/BatchProcess/
http://geoservices.tamu.edu/Services/Geocode/OtherGeocoders/

answered May 16 '14 at 23:21

albert

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Do you have any advice on using these services for this project? I am testing it now but not seeing how I'd do this. It seems like I would need to upload my own neighborhood data as well as my own latitude coordinates (my dataset). Then I could match them. Does that correspond to your process? – Learning stats by example May 19 '14 at 22:24
i would create a spreadsheet...anything .csv with name, lat, lon, and other corresponding headers. easiest would be google docs. – albert May 20 '14 at 18:39
I just posted my solution. I am very curious to see yours as I am limited by the Maps API ratelimit (2500 queries per day) and my dataset is much larger. – Learning stats by example May 25 '14 at 20:33
they have a limit? huh. we work around that in my brigade by getting more than 1 person contribute...streety smarts offers free geocoding for non-profits.... – albert May 28 '14 at 13:25
I just tried this it does NOT work. Gives addresses but not neighborhood. – Learning stats by example Aug 01 '14 at 20:08

score 5 · Answer 2 · answered May 16 '14 at 16:20

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Zillow provides Shapefiles for neighborhoods for the largest US Cities (includes NYC) for free (CC license). You can find them here:

http://www.zillow.com/howto/api/neighborhood-boundaries.htm

answered May 16 '14 at 16:20

Andrew - OpenGeoCode

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Could you walk me through how to use a shapefile Pythonically or in R? – Learning stats by example May 25 '14 at 20:34
Hi I was unable to make these work. Could you help please? – Learning stats by example Aug 01 '14 at 20:03

Learning stats by example · Accepted Answer · 2014-09-02T16:10:38.093

For anyone else looking to figure this out, the trick is the following.

You'll need

Your file with long/lat coordinates in NYC. You can obtain these by geoencoding addresses
Use this NYC neighborhoods geometry file
A Cartodb account.

Once you have all three, log into cartodb and upload your file with long/lat coordinates and the nyc neighborhood geometry file. Then follow these instructions:

Geoencode the long/lat coordinates as a goemetry object in your long/lat coordinate file.
Run the following SQL query from within the file:

SELECT s.*,n.neighborhood FROM {{yourFileName}} as s, nyc_pediacities_neighborhoods_v3_polygon as n WHERE ST_Within(s.the_geom,n.the_geom)

You're creating two objects, yourFile as s and the shapefile as n, then matching the geometries against one another with the WHERE clause.

That should create a new column with rows featuring the NYC neighborhood of the long/lat of the same row.

3 . Export your file.

The polygon file for NYC neighborhoods would be much easier to use than Shapefiles, such as from Zillow. — Andrew - OpenGeoCode, Sep 02 '14 at 16:10
@Andrew-OpenGeoCode Thanks but this is so easy. You just upload then run a query. What's the advantage? — Learning stats by example, Sep 02 '14 at 16:11

Converting Geographic Coordinates to New York City neighboorhood names

3 Answers3