Webmap of Allegheny municipalities and parcel data. Zoom for a clickable parcel map with owner name, property photograph, and link to the County Real Estate website for property sales information.

This dataset overlays a grid on the County to assist in locating a parcel. The grid squares are 3,500 by 4,500 square feet. The data was derived from original MAPINDX: Map Index Sheets from Block and Lot Grid of Property Assessment and based on aerial photography. Tiles are numbered in a clockwise spiral fashion starting with #1 at the point in downtown Pittsburgh. Each tile contains 16 Blocks. Each Index Sheet contains 16 lot/block sheets, labeled from left to right, top to bottom (4 across, 4 down): A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, J, K, L, M, N, P, R, S. The first (4) numeric characters in a parcelID indicate the Index sheet in which the parcel can be found, the alpha character identifies the block in which most (or all) of the property lies.

Files include data for bike lanes, protected bike lanes, trails, bike routes, shared lane markings, cautionary bike routes, and bridge data from the BikePGH Pittsburgh Bike Map. BikePGH developed this map in 2007 and has been publishing it both on paper and online ever since. See: http://bikepgh.org/maps for more info.

This dataset demarcates the municipal boundaries in Allegheny County. Data was created to portray the boundaries of the 130 Municipalities in Allegheny County the attribute table includes additional descriptive information including Councils of Government (COG) affiliation (regional governing and coordinating bodies comprised of several bordering municipalities), School District, Congressional District, FIPS and County Municipal Code and County Council District.

If viewing this description on the Western Pennsylvania Regional Data Center’s open data portal (https://www.wprdc.org), this dataset is harvested on a weekly basis from Allegheny County’s GIS data portal (https://openac.alcogis.opendata.arcgis.com/). The full metadata record for this dataset can also be found on Allegheny County’s GIS portal. You can access the metadata record and other resources on the GIS portal by clicking on the “Explore” button (and choosing the “Go to resource” option) to the right of the “ArcGIS Open Dataset” text below.

Category: Civic Vitality and Governance

Organization: Allegheny County

Department: Geographic Information Systems Group; Department of Information Technology

Temporal Coverage: current

Data Notes:

Coordinate System: Pennsylvania State Plane South Zone 3702; U.S. Survey Foot

Development Notes: none

Other: none

Related Document(s): Data Dictionary (none)

Frequency - Data Change: As needed

Frequency - Publishing: As needed

Data Steward Name: Eli Thomas

Data Steward Email: gishelp@alleghenycounty.us

The Land Cover dataset demarcates 14 land cover types by area; such as Residential, Commercial, Industrial, Forest, Agriculture, etc. If viewing this description on the Western Pennsylvania Regional Data Center’s open data portal (http://www.wprdc.org), this dataset is harvested on a weekly basis from Allegheny County’s GIS data portal (http://openac.alcogis.opendata.arcgis.com/). The full metadata record for this dataset can also be found on Allegheny County’s GIS portal. You can access the metadata record and other resources on the GIS portal by clicking on the “Explore” button (and choosing the “Go to resource” option) to the right of the “ArcGIS Open Dataset” text below. Category: Geography Organization: Allegheny County Department: Geographic Information Systems Group; Department of Administrative Services Temporal Coverage: 1994 Data Notes: Coordinate System: Pennsylvania State Plane South Zone 3702; U.S. Survey Foot Development Notes: The dataset was created by Chester Environmental through combined image processing and GIS analysis of Landsat TM imagery of October 2, 1992, existing aerial photography, hardcopy and digital mapping sources and Census Bureau demographic data. The original dataset was created in 1993, then updated by Chester in 1994. Other: none Related Document(s): Data Dictionary (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1VfUflfki42mpLSkr1R-up_OXGD3mHnv8tqeXf6XS9O0/edit?usp=sharing) Frequency - Data Change: As needed Frequency - Publishing: As needed Data Steward Name: Eli Thomas Data Steward Email: gishelp@alleghenycounty.us

Watersheds for Surface Water Streams and Rivers within Pittsburgh Boundaries. StreamStats was original source and geometry simplified afterwards.

Pittsburgh Neighborhoods

Real Property parcel characteristics for Allegheny County, PA. Includes information pertaining to land, values, sales, abatements, and building characteristics (if residential) by parcel. Disclaimer: Parcel information is provided from the Office of Property Assessments in Allegheny County. Content and availability are subject to change. Please review the Data Dictionary for details on included fields before each use. Property characteristics and values change due to a variety of factors such as court rulings, municipality permit processing and subdivision plans. Consequently the assessment system parcel data is continually changing. Please take the dynamic nature of this information into consideration before using it. Excludes name and contact information for property owners, as required by Ordinance 3478-07.

Orientation

The first two items listed below are slightly different versions of the most current property-assessments records. The first is optimized for faster download but has 1) a few fields (including PROPERTY_ZIP and MUNICODE) as integers instead of strings and 2) the date columns in two different formats. The second item downloads more slowly, is optimized for API queries, and has all dates in a standard YYYY-MM-DD format. Further down you can find useful links, documentation, and then archived versions of property assessments files.

Pittsburgh City Boundary

Pittsburgh Bridges

Overview

This dataset contains all DOMI Street Closure Permit data in the Computronix (CX) system from the date of its adoption (in May 2020) until the present. The data in each record can be used to determine when street closures are occurring, who is requesting these closures, why the closure is being requested, and for mapping the closures themselves. It is updated hourly (as of March 2024).

Preprocessing/Formatting

It is important to distinguish between a permit, a permit's street closure(s), and the roadway segments that are referenced to that closure(s).

• The CX system identifies a street in segments of roadway. (As an example, the CX system could divide Maple Street into multiple segments.)

• A single street closure may span multiple segments of a street.

• The street closure permit refers to all the component line segments.

• A permit may have multiple streets which are closed. Street closure permits often reference many segments of roadway.

The roadway_id field is a unique GIS line segment representing the aforementioned segments of road. The roadway_id values are assigned internally by the CX system and are unlikely to be known by the permit applicant. A section of roadway may have multiple permits issued over its lifespan. Therefore, a given roadway_id value may appear in multiple permits.

The field closure_id represents a unique ID for each closure, and permit_id uniquely identifies each permit. This is in contrast to the aforementioned roadway_id field which, again, is a unique ID only for the roadway segments.

City teams that use this data requested that each segment of each street closure permit be represented as a unique row in the dataset. Thus, a street closure permit that refers to three segments of roadway would be represented as three rows in the table. Aside from the roadway_id field, most other data from that permit pertains equally to those three rows. Thus, the values in most fields of the three records are identical.

Each row has the fields segment_num and total_segments which detail the relationship of each record, and its corresponding permit, according to street segment. The above example produced three records for a single permit. In this case, total_segments would equal 3 for each record. Each of those records would have a unique value between 1 and 3.

The geometry field consists of string values of lat/long coordinates, which can be used to map the street segments.

All string text (most fields) were converted to UPPERCASE data. Most of the data are manually entered and often contain non-uniform formatting. While several solutions for cleaning the data exist, text were transformed to UPPERCASE to provide some degree of regularization. Beyond that, it is recommended that the user carefully think through cleaning any unstructured data, as there are many nuances to consider. Future improvements to this ETL pipeline may approach this problem with a more sophisticated technique.

Known Uses

These data are used by DOMI to track the status of street closures (and associated permits).

Further Documentation and Resources

An archived dataset containing historical street closure records (from before May of 2020) for the City of Pittsburgh may be found here: https://data.wprdc.org/dataset/right-of-way-permits

Pittsburgh Zoning Districts

This is an interactive webmap of the Sanborn Fire Insurance maps of Pittsburgh and Allegheny County, PA. Not all maps are in copyright and posted. This project entailed georeferencing the index or key maps, and individual sheets if no index was available. Georeferenced maps were mosaicked and polygons were created with the extent of the index maps. Links to Penn State's online holdings were added if maps were out of copyright.

This dataset contains soil type and soil classification, by area. If viewing this description on the Western Pennsylvania Regional Data Center’s open data portal (http://www.wprdc.org), this dataset is harvested on a weekly basis from Allegheny County’s GIS data portal (http://openac.alcogis.opendata.arcgis.com/). The full metadata record for this dataset can also be found on Allegheny County’s GIS portal. You can access the metadata record and other resources on the GIS portal by clicking on the “Explore” button (and choosing the “Go to resource” option) to the right of the “ArcGIS Open Dataset” text below. Category: Environment Organization: Allegheny County Department: Geographic Information Systems Group; Department of Administrative Services Temporal Coverage: 2000 Data Notes: Coordinate System: Pennsylvania State Plane South Zone 3702; U.S. Survey Foot Development Notes: This data set is a digital soil survey and generally is the most detailed level of soil geographic data developed by the National Cooperative Soil Survey. The information was prepared by digitizing maps, by compiling information onto a planimetric correct base and digitizing, or by revising digitized maps using remotely sensed and other information. This data set consists of georeferenced digital map data and computerized attribute data. The map data are in a soil survey area extent format and include a detailed, field verified inventory of soils and miscellaneous areas that normally occur in a repeatable pattern on the landscape and that can be cartographically shown at the scale mapped. A special soil features layer (point and line features) is optional. This layer displays the location of features too small to delineate at the mapping scale, but they are large enough and contrasting enough to significantly influence use and management. The soil map units are linked to attributes in the National Soil Information System relational database, which gives the proportionate extent of the component soils and their properties. The soil map and data used in the SSURGO product were prepared by soil scientists as part of the National Cooperative Soil Survey Other: none Related Document(s): Data Dictionary for SOIL_CODE Related Document(s): https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/Internet/FSE_MANUSCRIPTS/pennsylvania/PA003/0/legends.pdf - the last page includes the soil legend for this dataset. Frequency - Data Change: As needed Frequency - Publishing: As needed Data Steward Name: Eli Thomas Data Steward Email: gishelp@alleghenycounty.us

1855 Map of the city of Pittsburgh with some of the surrounding communities. This map service includes a mosaic of several volumes of plat maps that were originally bound atlases. The mosaic was created using ArcGIS software from the scanned JPEG images, varying from 300-600 dpi. These images were obtained from the Historic Pittsburgh website (http://historicpittsburgh.org/maps-hopkins) The images were georeferenced to WGS84 Web Mercator and the borders were clipped to create a contiguous map.This product is to be used for reference purposes only. The original historical paper maps were sometimes damaged or distorted to varying degrees due to age and use. There are spatial inaccuracies and some places where the footprints do not lineup perfectly or in some cases overlap.

Pittsburgh Greenways

This webmap demarcates municipal voting districts in Allegheny County.

If viewing this description on the Western Pennsylvania Regional Data Center’s open data portal (http://www.wprdc.org), this dataset is harvested on a weekly basis from Allegheny County’s GIS data portal (http://openac.alcogis.opendata.arcgis.com/). The full metadata record for this dataset can also be found on Allegheny County’s GIS portal. You can access the metadata record and other resources on the GIS portal by clicking on the “Explore” button (and choosing the “Go to resource” option) to the right of the “ArcGIS Open Dataset” text below.

Category: Civic Vitality and Governance

Organization: Allegheny County

Department: Elections Divison; Department of Administrative Services

Temporal Coverage: 2015

Data Notes:

Coordinate System: Pennsylvania State Plane South Zone 3702; U.S. Survey Foot

Development Notes: County staff scanned original court maps into the GIS and rubber-sheeted them to fit the Allegheny County GIS Base Data developed from a flyover in 1992-93.

Other: none

Related Document(s): Data Dictionary (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1HR24LyBNpLwvJZoaGp-tBGRw0HRoXNIef6nU4UQQMMo/edit?usp=sharing)

Frequency - Data Change: As needed

Frequency - Publishing: As needed

Data Steward Name: Eli Thomas

Data Steward Email: gishelp@alleghenycounty.us

Pittsburgh Landslide Prone Areas

The Hydrology Feature Dataset contains photogrammetrically compiled water drainage features and structures including rivers, streams, drainage canals, locks, dams, lakes, ponds, reservoirs and mooring cells. Rivers, Lakes, Ponds, Reservoirs, Hidden Lakes, Reservoirs or Ponds: If greater than 25 feet and less than 30 feet wide, is captured as a double line stream. If greater than 30 feet wide it is captured as a river. Lakes are large standing bodies of water greater than 5 acres in size. Ponds are large standing bodies of water greater than 1 acre and less than 5 acres in size. Polygons are created from Stream edges and River Edges. The Ohio River, Monongahela River and Allegheny River are coded as Major Rivers. All other River and Stream polygons are coded as River. If a stream is less than 25 feet wide it is placed as a single line and coded as a Stream. Both sides of the stream are digitized and coded as a Stream for Streams whose width is greater than 25 feet. River edges are digitized and coded as River.

A Drainage Canal is a manmade or channelized hydrographic feature. Drainage Canals are differentiated from streams in that drainage canals have had the sides and/or bottom stabilized to prevent erosion for the predominant length of the feature. Streams may have had some stabilization done, but are primarily in a natural state. Lakes are large standing bodies of water greater than five acres in size. Ponds are large standing bodies of water greater than one acre in size and less than five acres in size. Reservoirs are manmade embankments of water. Included in this definition are both covered and uncovered water tanks. Reservoirs that are greater than one acre in size are digitized. Hidden Streams, Hidden Rivers and Hidden Drainage Canal or Culverts are those areas of drainage where the water flows through a manmade facility such as a culvert. Hydrology Annotation is not being updated but will be preserved. If a drainage feature has been removed, as apparent on the aerial photography, the associated drainage name annotation will be removed. A Mooring Cell is a structure to which tows can tie off while awaiting lockage. They are normally constructed of concrete and steel and are anchored to the river bottom by means of gravity or sheet piling.

Mooring Cells do not currently exist in the Allegheny County dataset but will be added. Locks are devices that are used to control flow or access to a hydrologic feature. The edges of the Lock are captured. Dams are devices that are used to hold or delay the natural flow of water. The edges of the Dam are shown.

This dataset is harvested on a weekly basis from Allegheny County’s GIS data portal. The full metadata record for this dataset can also be found on Allegheny County's GIS portal. You can access the metadata record and other resources on the GIS portal by clicking on the “Explore” button (and choosing the "Go to resource" option) to the right of the "ArcGIS Open Dataset" text below.

Category: Environment

Department: Geographic Information Systems Group; Department of Administrative Services

Data Notes: Coordinate System: Pennsylvania State Plane South Zone 3702; U.S. Survey Foot

Development Notes: Original Lakes and Drainage datasets combined to create this layer. Data was updated as a result of a flyover in the spring of 2004. A database field has been defined for all map features named Update Year". This database field will define which dataset provided each map feature. Map features from the current map will be set to "2004". The earlier dataset map features the earlier dataset map features used to supplement the area near the county boundary will be set to "1993". All new or modified map data will have the value for "Update Year" set to "2004".

Data Dictionary: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/16BWrRkoPtq2ANRkrbG7CrfQk2dUsWRiaS2Ee1mTn7l0/edit?usp=sharing

Most of the text in this description originally appeared on the Mapping Inequality Website. Robert K. Nelson, LaDale Winling, Richard Marciano, Nathan Connolly, et al., “Mapping Inequality,” American Panorama, ed. Robert K. Nelson and Edward L. Ayers,

"HOLC staff members, using data and evaluations organized by local real estate professionals--lenders, developers, and real estate appraisers--in each city, assigned grades to residential neighborhoods that reflected their "mortgage security" that would then be visualized on color-coded maps. Neighborhoods receiving the highest grade of "A"--colored green on the maps--were deemed minimal risks for banks and other mortgage lenders when they were determining who should received loans and which areas in the city were safe investments. Those receiving the lowest grade of "D," colored red, were considered "hazardous."

Conservative, responsible lenders, in HOLC judgment, would "refuse to make loans in these areas [or] only on a conservative basis." HOLC created area descriptions to help to organize the data they used to assign the grades. Among that information was the neighborhood's quality of housing, the recent history of sale and rent values, and, crucially, the racial and ethnic identity and class of residents that served as the basis of the neighborhood's grade. These maps and their accompanying documentation helped set the rules for nearly a century of real estate practice. "

HOLC agents grading cities through this program largely "adopted a consistently white, elite standpoint or perspective. HOLC assumed and insisted that the residency of African Americans and immigrants, as well as working-class whites, compromised the values of homes and the security of mortgages. In this they followed the guidelines set forth by Frederick Babcock, the central figure in early twentieth-century real estate appraisal standards, in his Underwriting Manual: "The infiltration of inharmonious racial groups ... tend to lower the levels of land values and to lessen the desirability of residential areas."

These grades were a tool for redlining: making it difficult or impossible for people in certain areas to access mortgage financing and thus become homeowners. Redlining directed both public and private capital to native-born white families and away from African American and immigrant families. As homeownership was arguably the most significant means of intergenerational wealth building in the United States in the twentieth century, these redlining practices from eight decades ago had long-term effects in creating wealth inequalities that we still see today. Mapping Inequality, we hope, will allow and encourage you to grapple with this history of government policies contributing to inequality."

Data was copied from the Mapping Inequality Website for communities in Western Pennsylvania where data was available. These communities include Altoona, Erie, Johnstown, Pittsburgh, and New Castle. Data included original and georectified images, scans of the neighborhood descriptions, and digital map layers. Data here was downloaded on June 9, 2020.