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The City Planning Facilities Database aggregates more than 35,000 records from 52 different public data sources provided by City, State, and Federal agencies.
While each source agency classifies its facilities according to their own naming systems, we have grouped all facilities and program sites into the following seven categories to help planners navigate the data more easily:
- Health and Human Services
- Education, Child Welfare, and Youth
- Parks, Gardens, and Historical Sites
- Libraries and Cultural Programs
- Public Safety, Emergency Services, and Administration of Justice
- Core Infrastructure and Transportation
- Administration of Government
Within each of these domains, each record is further categorized into a set of facility groups, subgroups, and types that are intended to make the data easy to navigate and more useful for specific planning purposes. Facility types and names appear as they do in source datasets, wherever possible. A full listing of the facility categories is provided in the data dictionary.
| Dataset Name | Facilities Database (FacDB) |
| Agency Name | Department of City Planning |
| Update Frequency | Quarterly |
| Dataset Description | Facilities and program sites that are owned, operated, funded, licensed or certified by a City, State, or Federal agency |
| Dataset Keywords | Facilities, Education, Child Welfare, Parks, Gardens, Historical Sites, Libraries, Cultural Programs, Public Safety, Emergency Services, Administration of Justice, Health Services, Human Services, Infrastructure, Transportation, Government Administration |
| Dataset Category | City Government |
| Additional Information | The Department of City Planning aggregates information about 33,000+ facilities and program sites that are owned, operated, funded, licensed or certified by a City, State, or Federal agency in the City of New York into a central database called the City Planning Facilities Database FacDB). These facilities generally help to shape quality of life in the city’s neighborhoods, and this dataset is the basis for a series of planning activities. This public data resource allows all New Yorkers to understand the breadth of government resources in their neighborhoods. |
Each record in FacDB represents a facility site.
FacDB is the most comprehensive spatial data resource available for facilities run by public and non-public entities in NYC, but it does not claim to capture every facility within the specified domains. Some facilities are deliberately excluded from the data that source agencies provide in order to protect the safety and privacy of their clients. Also, many records could not be geocoded.
There are known to be cases when the address provided in the source data is for a headquarters office rather than the facility site location. Unfortunately, these could not be systematically verified. For more detailed information on a specific facility reach out to the respective oversight agency.
Fair Share Analysis, Neighborhood studies, Facilities planning
Analysis Limitations. As a result of the data limitations and inconsistencies listed below users should be careful in their use of this database so as to avoid developing suspect analyses. For example, a comparison of the density or accessibility of facilities across neighborhoods should recognize that some of the facilities included are organizational headquarters rather than service sites and that this database is not authoritatively comprehensive. In addition, we rely on source data from other agencies to populate the database, and some of these sources may fall out-of-date. Users can find the date of each source dataset’s latest update in the source data dictionary.
Missing Records. Currently, FacDB is the most comprehensive spatial data resource available for facilities run by public and non-public entities in NYC, but it does not claim to capture every facility within the specified domains. Some facilities are deliberately excluded from the data that source agencies provide in order to protect the safety and privacy of their clients. Also, many records could not be geocoded. To learn more about how the data are processed, please review the Data Sources and Compilation Process.
Duplicates. Please be aware that this dataset may include cases of duplicate records for the same facility because several source datasets have content that overlap.
Administrative Addresses. There are known to be cases when the address provided in the source data is for a headquarters office rather than the facility site location. Unfortunately, these could not be systematically verified. For more detailed information on a specific facility reach out to the respective oversight agency.
Public Accessibility of Sites. DCP is unable to verify the public accessibility of all sites. For example, some playgrounds or playing fields may only be accessible to participants in certain programs.
Since the facility records are aggregated from many datasets designed for different purposes, the data will be transformed over several stages to reach its final state. The stages are described below and all the scripts used are available on the NYC Planning GitHub page.
Data loading. Since the source datasets have been maintained by various agencies and updated with different frequencies, datasets are loaded into Amazon s3 as a centralized datahub preparing for the downstream data processing. The list of data sources can be found here.
Geoprocessing. When records have address information, spatial data is assigned by taking the centroid of the BIN returned by Geosupport that matches the DoITT building footprints dataset. If a BIN is not available, the latitude and longitude returned by Geosupport is used to create the geometry for the record. If these fields are not available from Geosupport, but the source data has spatial information (i.e. coordinates) the spatial data is created from the source data. If the source data consisted of polygon geometries, the centroid of the polygon was used to assign the geometry for the records in the database. There are cases where the coordinates from the source data fall in the roadbed and not inside a BBL boundary due to the geocoding technique used by the source. Lastly, if a geometry could not be assigned from the BIN, latitude/longitude from Geosupport, or source data, the centroid of the BBL from the clipped MapPLUTO is used. Other geographic information such as the community district is taken from Geosupport if a value is returned, otherwise administrative districts are assigned via spatial joins where the record has a geometry.
Duplicate Record Removal. Several of the source datasets have content that overlaps. Duplicate records were identified by querying for all the records that fall within the same BIN or BBL and have the same Facility Subgroup or Type, same Facility Name, or same Oversight Agency. Where duplicate records were identified all but the primary record was removed from the database.
The facilities database is being provided by the Department of City Planning (DCP) for informational purposes only. DCP does not warrant the completeness, accuracy, content, or fitness for any particular purpose or use of the dataset, nor are any such warranties to be implied or inferred with respect to the dataset as furnished on the website
DCP and the City are not liable for any deficiencies in the completeness, accuracy, content, or fitness for any particular purpose or use of the dataset, or applications utilizing Dataset, provided by any third party. The City Planning Facilities Database (FacDB) is only as good as the source data it aggregates, and the Department of City Planning cannot verify the accuracy of all records. Please read more about specific data and analysis limitations before using this data.