Zillow has released shapefile boundaries describing neighborhoods in 150 major cities, grouped by state. Available under the Creative Commons license, they’re free for general use in any application as long as you attribute Zillow as the source. Coverage is still limited; in Arizona, only the two largest urban areas (Phoenix and Tucson) are included. But Zillow encourages submissions of neighborhood boundaries for cities not currently covered in their database, and will work on including those submissions after they’re verified. Projection is geographic (latitude/longitude), NAD83.
Phoenix neighborhoods (created with the TatukGIS Viewer)
Other posts in the Demographic Data series
- Plotting US Census Data In Google Earth
- Worldwide Digital Geographic Data From The FAO
- US Census Data (And More) Visualization In Google Earth
- Global One-Degree Gridded Economic And Climate Data
- Demographic Maps And Data From Social Explorer
- Interactive US Census Data Viewing In Google Earth With The GE-Census Explorer
- Demographic Data For Your Zipcode
- Historical Census Data From the National Historical Geographic Information System
- Free Neighborhood Boundary Shapefiles
- Some TIGER Data Finally Out In Shapefile Format
- Old TIGER Data Still Available
- Urban & Environmental Modeler’s Datakit
- Mapping Human DNA Diversity
- Quick Country Information With The World Gazetteer
- Plot Demographic Data In Map, Graph, And Tabular Format With PolicyMap
- Animated 3D Thematic Maps With Uuorld
- Create Your Own Gapminder Animated Charts
Just a small point - the data isn’t really “free” (you can own a thing that is given to you for free, but you will never own their data; any changes you make must be shared in kind). Interesting model though!
There are obviously many different definitions of “free”, as in “free speech”, “free beer”, “free software”. When I say “free”, I mean that it doesn’t cost you any money to use it.