San Francisco shapefiles

This repo includes San Francisco shapefiles that The San Francisco Chronicle data team often uses. These shapefiles are mainly for visualization, as they only have an ID variable in them.

The following geographic areas are included in the repo:

• Census tracts (1960-2020): A census tract is a small Census-designated area with about 1,200 to 8,000 residents. Census tract boundaries change once every 10 years (with the Decennial Census). The SF census tracts folder includes shapefiles for each decade from 1960 to 2020. The Chronicle often analyzes population data by census tract to understand demographic changes that happen within the city, on a smaller scale. We recently analyzed changes in S.F.'s Asian population in the last six decades by census tract.
• Neighborhoods: San Francisco has many neighborhood boundaries. We include shapefiles for four: Department of Elections neighborhoods, Planning Department's analysis neighborhoods, Planning Department's notification neighborhoods and SF311's neighborhoods. We typically use the election department's set of neighborhoods for elections-related analyses and the analysis neighborhoods for most other use cases. If you're curious why there are so many neighborhood boundaries, read our story exploring how the city uses each boundary set.

All shapefiles are shoreline-clipped (i.e. they exclude bodies of water).

How to use these shapefiles

A lot of city data is grouped by neighborhood or Census-designated areas, but in order to visualize the data on a map, you need to merge it with the corresponding shapefile. With the help of a GIS application (we use Mapshaper), you can merge your dataset with the shapefile, matching the two on the tract ID or neighborhood name (make sure they use the same values in both datasets!)

Folder + file structure

• SF census tracts
  • sf-tracts-1960-clipped.geojson - Census tracts from 1960. GISJOIN2 has the full GEOID for the tract.
  • sf-tracts-1970-clipped.geojson - Census tracts from 1970. GISJOIN2 has the full GEOID for the tract.
  • sf-tracts-1980-clipped.geojson - Census tracts from 1980. GISJOIN2 has the full GEOID for the tract.
  • sf-tracts-1990-clipped.geojson - Census tracts from 1990. GISJOIN2 has the full GEOID for the tract.
  • sf-tracts-2000-clipped.geojson - Census tracts from 2000. TRACTCE00 is the census tract code.
  • sf-tracts-2010-clipped.geojson - Census tracts from 2010. tractce10 is the census tract code.
  • sf-tracts-2020-clipped.geojson - Census tracts from 2020. TRACTCE20 is the census tract code.
• SF neighborhoods
  • sf-neighborhoods-311.json - 311 neighborhoods
  • sf-neighborhoods-analysis.json - analysis neighborhoods
  • sf-neighborhoods-elections.json - Election Department's neighborhoods
  • sf-neighborhoods-notifications.json - notification neighborhoods

Sources

These shapefiles are sourced from the U.S. Census Bureau, University of Minnesota’s Population Center (IPUMS NHGIS) and San Francisco agencies.