urbanMSP

Here's a thread for useful web resources for researching things related to everything we talk about around here.

Hennepin County Property Interactive Map, for looking up parcel sizes, values, taxes, etc.: http://gis.co.hennepin.mn.us/property/map/

The Borchert Map Library's Minnesota Historical Aerial Photographs Online (MHAPO), useful for digging up old aerial photographs of the Twin Cities area, dating back to the 1920s in Saint Paul and the 1930s elsewhere: http://map.lib.umn.edu/mhapo/

A somewhat related site is http://historicaerials.com/, which covers many areas of the country. I'm not sure if it's working at the moment though -- it requires Silverlight, which doesn't work on my computer, and the fall-back HTML version is broken for me.

Great idea for a thread, Mulad. I'd add that most of the counties around here have GIS sites with parcel data. Here's the link to Ramsey County's, which I actually like better than Hennepin's, although it's not as easy to use:

http://maps.metro-inet.us/RamseyCoGIS/CXviewer.htm

Minneapolis' Property Info site is a useful supplement, as it usually has data on the number of units in multifamily properties, and sometimes the permit/license history is interesting:

http://apps.ci.minneapolis.mn.us/Addres ... ppID=PIApp

Minneapolis also has a good traffic count map that's easy to use and has a lot of count history:

http://www.minneapolismn.gov/publicwork ... fic-counts

But I do like MnDot's new Traffic Mapping Application that makes it much easier to view the data, once you figure out their clunky layer selector:

http://www.dot.state.mn.us/traffic/data/tma.html

If my memory serves me correctly, there are quite a few of you on here that are experts and finding info on the county property databases. I also seem to remember comments about Hennepin County's site/data being easy to use, and Ramsey County's being bad. I tried to look and it seemed I had to pay for access...

Can anyone help me? I'm trying to find the definition (property lines) around Como Park and Lake. Thanks!

Here's a newer link for Ramsey County. It's not all that difficult to use, but it needs Silverlight. Note that any of these online sources aren't going to be 100% accurate -- you probably need to get a surveyor out to the site if a really detailed check needs to be done.

I've found Olmsted County's system very difficult to use, since it looks like it requires bouncing between two sites.

Thanks. I'll check it out! This is what I was hoping I could be directed to.

I use all of the metro counties' property info sites all the time for tax prep, wish they were all like Dakota county's. Best looking and easiest to use.

Minneapolis & St. Paul Neighborhood Profiles: trends and data by neighborhood

http://www.mncompass.org/profiles/neigh ... aul#!areas

I thought the 'asian' concentrations at the U of M were interesting.

After living in Hopkins a while, I'm unsurprised at the "Asian" concentration along Blake. It's a high concentration of Indian Subcontinent immigrants. It's not in that map, but on the map at the source webpage.

THIS map. http://demographics.coopercenter.org/DotMap/index.html

Does anyone know why seemingly all of MNDOT's links are broken now? Did they migrate to a new web address or something? over the last number of months whenever i try opening a webpage or pdf that turns out to be MNDOT's, it never works. I've tried it in both chrome and internet explorer, but neither seem to work.

Things like this pdf:
https://www.dot.state.mn.us/maps/gdma/d ... ramsey.pdf

Or this page about being unable to access MNDOT's website:
https://www.dot.state.mn.us/information ... bsite.html

Does anyone know why seemingly all of MNDOT's links are broken now? Did they migrate to a new web address or something? over the last number of months whenever i try opening a webpage or pdf that turns out to be MNDOT's, it never works. I've tried it in both chrome and internet explorer, but neither seem to work.

Things like this pdf:
https://www.dot.state.mn.us/maps/gdma/d ... ramsey.pdf

Or this page about being unable to access MNDOT's website:
https://www.dot.state.mn.us/information ... bsite.html

I've had a lot of trouble with the MnDOT website as well. I assumed it was a temporary problem, but you're right it has been ongoing for several months. The only browser I can get any MnDot website to load on is Firefox, which I don't use much. The link you posted above doesn't even work in Firefox for me, however.

I just tried downloading those pages using "wget", a Unix command-line tool, and the connections timed out. That makes me feel something is down completely (does the main web server proxy connections to other backend servers for certain pages?)

They turned on something called HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS), which basically tells your browser to always go to the HTTPS version of a website, even if you manually type in http://... instead of https://. This is usually a good idea and great for security, but it generally comes with the side effect of not being able to stop serving pages over HTTPS.

Narrator: "MnDOT stopped serving pages over HTTPS."

MnDOT links will work in your browser if you manually change https:// to http:// links and you didn't visit their site while they had HSTS enabled. The page you linked to tells has instructions on to remove the HSTS preference in Chrome for MnDOT, I assume other browsers have similar methods. Here's the page content if you're stuck:

Why can't I access MnDOT's website using Chrome?

Answer

We’ve been hearing that certain people are having trouble accessing MnDOT’s website using the Chrome browser. If you are getting a network error and seeing "https://" in your URL, first try clearing your browser cache to clear your past browsing history. Then visit www.mndot.gov. If that doesn’t work, follow these additional steps to fix the error (credit: classically.me):

In the address bar, type chrome://net-internals/#hsts
Type "dot.state.mn.us" in the text field below Delete domain
Click the Delete button.
Type "dot.state.mn.us" in the text field below Query domain
Click the Query button.
Your response should be Not found

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the National Association for Public Health Statistics and Information partnered in a three year effort to calculate life expectancy by census tract.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business ... e-average/

The data files have been released.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/usaleep/usaleep.html

I don’t have the tools to map this but I’d love to see some of you talented mappers take the Minnesota data and map it!