Where can I find a city/neighborhood database?

Question

Where can I find a database of cities and neighborhoods using MySQL? I'm only interested in US areas. Price doesn't matter.

The database must help identify locations by ZIP code. I've already got a database showing cities and states, but I need to find surrounding neighborhoods as well.

I saw good example on http://www.oodle.com/.

Answer 1

The Zillow Neighborhood data has a CC-sharealike license and it is pretty comprehensive. It is widely used in the Geospatial world nowadays.

Cheers

Answer 2

For a fee... you can subscribe to Maponics' Neighborhood dataset
While Maponics provides mostly GIS data, (eg. allowing one to pinpoint on a map the boundaries of neighborhoods and such), the simple neighborhood list is also available, I think.
Another commercial offering is Urban Mapping's

In you target particular cities/counties, there are plenty of free resources to be found, oft' in the .gov / .us sites, for specific cities and counties. Unfortunately aside from the difficulty of locating such resources (there doesn't seem to exist any practical directory for such local gov-managed databases), there is no standard as to the format in which the data is stored or the specific semantics of the data collected. Luckily, ZIP-code is rather unanbiguous, and he neighborhood concept relatively general (even though the neighborhoods themselves can be quite dynamic, with bot the introduction of new neighborhood names, and some minor shifting of boundaries).

The overall complexity of the task of compiling such databases, the long half-life of the data, and the potentially lucrative uses of such data, seem to explain why it is hard to find non-commercial sources.

Answer 3

This is an old question - but there is a far better and EASIER way of doing it as of June 2015: http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/geocode/json?address=YOUR_ADDRESS&sensor=false

Example: http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/geocode/json?address=11%20W%2053rd%20St%20New%20York&sensor=false

Answer 4

Yelp has a neighborhood API. http://www.yelp.com/developers/documentation/technical_overview

Answer 5

Here's a great site offering free databases for both cities and countries:

http://ipinfodb.com/ip_database.php

Answer 6

It might be worth checking out some of the links in this article. There are several where you might find the data you're after.

Answer 7

Infochimps has the Zillow Neighborhoods API:

http://www.infochimps.com/datasets/zillow-neighborhoods

Answer 8

Maponics has over 150,000 neighborhoods worldwide available in MySQL and other formats, as well as an API.

Answer 9

Urban Mapping has an API to find neighborhoods by address, City/State, and as you need in your case, Zip Code (called the getNeighborhoodsByPostalCode method).

Here is a link to their demo apps which show how it works: URBANWARE API Demo Applications

Edit:
Urban Mapping doesn't exist anymore, and the Demo link has linkrot; here's what it did look like, via Wayback Machine

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While this isn't a database per se, you could quickly populate your own database by calling their API for every Zip code you'd be interested in seeing.

Note that this is part of their Premium API. If you have the long/lat coordinates of each city, you can use their free API to get a list of neighborhoods whose boundaries contain the long/lat coordinates.