Project Background
I live in Denver's Berkeley Park Neighborhood. The neighborhood has been rapidly changing in recent years. Older houses are being demolished and larger, modern homes are being built in their place. I wanted to see an overview of the whole neighborhood and the change that is occurring. I created a map showing the houses in the neighborhood that have been torn down since 2005.
The colored parcels in the map below represent home that have been rebuilt. Pan or Zoom the map and click on a parcel for more information.
Process
I first downloaded a shapefile with parcels from the City and County of Denver website. I then created and digitized a polygon of the Berkeley Park neighborhood border. I used this polygon to clip the parcels and exported the result as a shapefile, giving me just the parcels in the neighborhood. The parcels came with an attribute for the year built up to 2014. I did a select by attribute query for the year built for 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, and 2014, created separate layers for each year, and symbolized them for differentiation on the map. I used demolition permits (1D) issued by Denver to map the demolished (or soon to be demolished) homes for 2015. The City posts issued building permits on its website. The permits are posted as PDFs so the data had to imported into Microsoft Excel. Once in Excel, I had to manipulate the data so the address field in the permits table matched the format of the address field in the Denver parcels shapefile table. I joined the table of demolition permits issued with the parcel shapefile and then was able to map and symbolize the parcels which have demolition permits issued by year. The aerial imagery is from ArcMap's world imagery base map service. The resulting map depicts one aspect of the change in the neighborhood landscape.
Initially this map was just for a poster project. When displaying the map for the first time on a computer screen I became dissatisfied with the static single image screen shot. I then looked into what a free account with ArcGIS Online had to offer and created an interactive web map using the same data.