This web service depicts nearly 17,000 neighborhood boundaries in over 650 U.S. cities. Zillow created the neighborhood boundaries and is sharing them with the public under a Creative Commons license. Users of the data must credit Zillow as the data source. Additional information regarding this dataset can be found at https://www.zillow.com/howto/api/neighborhood-boundaries.htm. Note that neighborhood boundaries are not formal geographic boundaries for legal or jurisdictional purposes and should not be interpreted as such.

Context

This dataset contains shapefiles outlining 558 neighborhoods in 50 major cities in New York state, notably including Albany, Buffalo, Ithaca, New York City, Rochester, and Syracuse. This adds context to your datasets by identifying the neighborhood of any locations you have, as coordinates on their own don't carry a lot of information.

Content

What's inside is more than just rows and columns. Make it easy for others to get started by describing how you acquired the data and what time period it represents, too. What fields does it include? What's the time period of the data and how was it collected?

Four files are included containing data about the shapes: an SHX file, a DBF file, an SHP file, and a PRJ file. Including all of them in your input data are necessary, as they all contain pieces of the data; one file alone will not have everything that you need.

Seeing how none of these files are plaintext, it can be a little difficult to get set up with them. I highly recommend using mapshaper.org to get started- this site will show you the boundaries drawn on a plane, as well as allow you to export the files in a number of different formats (e.g. GeoJSON, CSV) if you are unable to use them in the format they are provided in. Personally, I have found it easier to work with the shapefile format though.

To get started with the shapefile in R, you can use the the rgdal and rgeos packages. To see an example of these being used, be sure to check out my kernel, "Incorporating neighborhoods into your model".

Acknowledgements

These files were provided by Zillow and are available under a Creative Commons license.

Inspiration

I'll be using these in the NYC Taxi Trip Duration competition to add context to the pickup and dropoff locations of the taxi rides and hopefully greatly improve my predictions.