Skip to content

Sanitation Districts

Matt Schell edited this page Nov 13, 2018 · 10 revisions

Sanitation Districts are the middle-tier geography in which the Department of Sanitation manages work. Sanitation Districts are commonly referred to as "DSNY Districts" and pronounced "Dee-Ess-En-Why Districts."

Sanitation Districts nest within the top-level Sanitation-Zones. Sanitation Districts are built up from Sanitation-Sections. Sanitation Districts are similar to Community-Districts, with most Sanitation Districts having a corresponding Community District with a matching code and similar boundaries. However Sanitation Districts do not include territory that is not served by the Department of Sanitation, like airports and large parks.

Sanitation Districts are named like "BKS06" for district 6 within the Brooklyn South Sanitation-Zones. The Department of Sanitation defines and uses this name. Sanitation Districts also have codes like "306" which is district 6 within Brooklyn Borough (borough code 3). The Department of City Planning uses and defines Sanitation District codes. Oh yes, this dataset uses 2 different unique identifiers.

NYC Open Data

https://data.cityofnewyork.us/City-Government/DSNY-Districts/6j86-5s7z

These boundaries occasionally change, often in the fall in preparation for high-profile snow removal season. Good luck determining which download link is correct. As of fall 2018 you will get different shapes depending on which download option you choose. Some of the downloads appear to be not just old, but straight up incorrect with chunks of the city missing from the file. The safest option may be to select the "original" download which produces a .geojson file with a decent-looking date in the file name.

As of fall 2018 the links to the arcgis REST services no longer appear to work.

Geocoding and Sanitation Districts

Given an address we can also derive its Sanitation District from New York City's geocoders. They will return the code (ex 306) from the Department of City Planning.

Clone this wiki locally