2000115-Strengthening-Communities-with-Neighborhood-Data

42 Strengthening Communities with Neighborhood Data
agencies and major universities. The technology was also very specialized,
used largely by technology aficionados who understood its complex
world of vectors, rasters, polygons, lines, and points. Over time, however,
use of the technology spread. The computing power needed to run GIS
technology has become affordable and widely available, and the software
has become more intuitive and simpler for the average person to use.
Historically, local governments used GIS technology in their planning
and zoning departments and property assessment offices, departments
in which decisions on land use dominate the agenda. The spatial
nature of the vast majority of local government data allows jurisdictions
not only to document and map what is located within the community’s
geographic boundaries, but also to create alternative scenarios to test
assumptions before decisions are made. As more departments saw the
analytic power available through GIS, they adapted it for their own purposes.
Nearly all local government departments, no matter what their
mission and purpose, can benefit from the analytic power of GIS technology
(Fleming 2014). Consider just a few of the types of questions that
can be answered using GIS:
• If we locate a new community center in this location, how many
children under the age of 5 will live within six blocks of it? how
many citizens over the age of 65?
• If we allow this level of density in a residential zone, how will that
affect the overall streetscape?
• Where are the current fire stations located within the city? What
kind of population base do they serve?
• Where are the grocery stores and farmers’ markets located within
our community? Where are the households living at or below the
poverty level located in relation to those venues?
As use of GIS spread to more departments, the way the technology is
implemented and managed within local government changed. Independent,
stand-alone, single-department programs have given way to an enterprise
approach in which core datasets are developed, harmonized, and
made available for use by all service departments across the local government
organization. Generally these core GIS datasets are maintained and
updated by a central GIS office. Specialized datasets required by specific service
departments—for example, crime data for police, park amenities and
facilities for parks and recreation, or health statistics for public health—