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The best option for getting the full GIS project experience is to download data from online GIS data portals. You will also gain exposure to the best GIS data websites for the Houston region. For this exercise, we will be looking at rivers and wastewater outfalls in Houston's Super Neighborhoods.
Downloading data from source websites
COHGIS Open Data Portal
The COHGIS (City of Houston GIS) Open Data Portal website provides over 100 data sets including administrative boundaries, amenity locations, transportation routes, crime, and flooding. For this tutorial, we will download population and housing data from the 2010 census, which has been aggregated to super neighborhood boundaries.
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Whenever you see a URL that ends in opendata.arcgis.com, you will know that you are visiting a standard ArcGIS Open Data portal.
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First, click the following link to obtain the super neighborhood dataset: SuperNeighborhoods.zip
Downloading data from source websites
In this case, we are looking for census data by super neighborhood. To learn more about super neighborhoods, visit the City of Houston Super Neighbhorhoods webpage.
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H-GAC GIS Datasets
The Houston-Galveston Area Council (H-GAC) is the 13-county Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO) for the Houston region. Federal legislation requires that an MPO be designated for each urbanized area with a population greater than 50,000 people (as established by the U.S. Census Bureau) in order to conduct long-range metropolitan transportation planning and be eligible for Federal funding for transportation projects. Their mission to carry out metropolitan transportation planning means that MPOs are a great source of data on topics such as demographics, employment, land use, transportation, and environmental conditions and most of these topics are well-suited towards GIS analysis.
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