131M American Buildings
102 points by marklit 5 days ago | 22 comments
  • cranberryturkey 5 days ago |
    any cool ideas I could build with this data?
    • delichon 5 days ago |
      A sandbox game with a map 1 to 1 with the ground truth.
      • cranberryturkey 5 days ago |
        i have no idea what that even means.
      • arminiusreturns 3 hours ago |
        What would the licensing be? I have a test earth I'm doing this with in Godot, but am paranoid about using anything not GPL/CC compat...
    • IncreasePosts 3 hours ago |
      An application that simulates shadows at a particular location. For real estate purposes, seeing what kind of sunshine you would get in your backyard when you purchase that house with a backyard in the north.
      • _boffin_ 3 hours ago |
        CoreLogic was doing something like this, but line of sight from a window and then be able to possibly identify the scene / view that can be had from that window.
      • maxerickson 2 hours ago |
        The geometry is just the building footprint. You could probably do some sort of estimate as to how likely the yard was to have sun, but it wouldn't enable doing anything detailed.
  • cschep 4 hours ago |
    Desktop computers are amazing these days.
  • rubyfan 3 hours ago |
    Anyone know if this is commercial buildings only or does it include residential too?
    • jeffbee 3 hours ago |
      Virtually all of the buildings are residential. There are 20x more residential than anything else.
      • pfdietz 2 hours ago |
        Does it include bike sheds? I feel I could spend a long time on that part of the database.
        • maxerickson 2 hours ago |
          One of the criteria for inclusions is an area greater than 450 square feet.

          You can look at it in a slippy map: https://gis-fema.hub.arcgis.com/pages/usa-structures (a couple clicks required from there).

          In my area it doesn't particularly identify garages well, so you probably can't spend that much time on bike sheds.

        • _carbyau_ 2 hours ago |
        • oliyoung 2 hours ago |
          Wonderfully executed joke. 10pts.
          • gerdesj an hour ago |
            You only get + or -.

            I love to see a wry comment being taken seriously too and this one did not disappoint.

        • sailfast an hour ago |
          Only if they're blue though. A true bike shed has to be some shade of blue.
      • rubyfan 10 minutes ago |
        A lot of them don't have addresses. I wonder if it can be intersected with another data set that has more complete address list.
  • didgetmaster 3 hours ago |
    I am tempted to import this data into my system and build a pivot table of building type (PRIM_OCC) by state.

    I could then graph the data (pie chart, bar graph, etc) to show how the building type distribution (e.g. residential ratio per hospital) varies between the states.