20260407
12020600
1.0
FALSE
BuildingRestrictionLN_PF
002
1279898.974339
1337341.760700
420213.168356
483941.520230
1
Projected
GCS_North_American_1983
Linear Unit: Foot_US (0.304801)
NAD_1983_StatePlane_Maryland_FIPS_1900_Feet
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20260414
15430300
20260414
15430300
150000000
5000
dataset
external
3cf56e1fc8cc8205cbc5981374be7a2dd7af6e10
Office of the Chief Technology Officer
(202) 727-2277
200 I Street SE
Washington
DC
20003
US
dcgis@dc.gov
8:30 am - 5 pm
GIS Data Coordinator
GIS Data Coordinator
True
Office of the Chief Technology Officer
20260414
ArcGIS Metadata
1.0
Enterprise Geodatabase Feature Class
<DIV STYLE="text-align:Left;"><DIV><DIV><P><SPAN>These are lines beyond which property owners or others have no legal or vested rights to extend a building or any part thereof without approval of the proper authorities; ordinarily a line of demarcation between public and private property, but also applied to a building restriction line, when recorded in the records of the Surveyor.</SPAN></P></DIV></DIV></DIV>
Department of Buildings
Property
Land
Lot
planningCadastre
Square
DC
District of Columbia
Land
Lot
planning cadastre
Property
Square
vpmdata
Washington DC
DOB
building restriction
building
The Vector Property data was developed with the oversight of the Office of the Chief Technology Officer (OCTO) - DC GIS, Department of Buildings (DOB) - Office of the Surveyor (OS), and Office of Tax and Revenue (OTR) - Real Property Tax Administration (RPTA). This effort was undertaken with 2 primary goals: - Support and improve the daily business processes of the two DC agencies that originate and manage land record in the District of Columbia. - Provide important GIS base layers which will be used extensively by many DC government agencies and private companies. Below are the responsibilities which DC agencies have provided throughout the Vector Property data creation and maintenance application lifecycle. Office of the Surveyor- subject matter expertise, provides access and understanding of source documents, extensive resource support, and assists with Vector Property GDB and Maintenance requirements. RPTA- subject matter expertise, provides access and understanding of source documents, extensive resource and IT support, and assists with Vector Property GDB and Maintenance requirements. OCTO- Assists with Geodatabase and Maintenance requirements, QC and Program Management staffing. Vector Property database and Citrix Support. Project oversight. Air Rights (AirRightsLotsPT, AirRightsLotsLN, AirRightsLotsPLY) - Air right lots are established by RPTA to reflect a party’s right to construct an improvement above an existing area of land that is not owned by the constructor. They are a type of development right in real estate referring to the empty space about a property. These tax lot numbers start at 7000. There are approximately 704 air rights lots. Air rights are taxed in DC.
Condo Approval Lots - Condo lots are individual lots for each condominium. The lot numbers normally range from 2000-6999. These condo lots are not geographically defined other than being within a air rights, record, tax or a combination of lots that has one or more condo buildings within it. A condo regime number is assigned to each residential Condo application or Article of Confederation regardless of how many buildings there are at any one site. The Regime number starts with a 1, 2, or 3 depending upon where the condo is located and where they fall in the tri-annual assessment process of RPTA. All numbers after the first are consecutive. RPTA maintains the master list of Regime numbers for residential properties. Commercial condos are not associated with a Regime number and in order to properly track all condos, a unique Regime number was created. RPTA then establishes individual accounts for each condominium unit and assigns a condo lot number to that account. RPTA maintains the master list of Regime numbers and their relationship to approved condos. There are roughly 66571 condo lots and there associations are as follows: 49486 condos were approved for record lots, 16867 were approved for tax lots, 2817 were approved for air rights lots, and 2600 were approved for both air rights and tax lots. The CondoPly layer was created to assist users in visualizing the relationship between ground surface lots (Record Lots), overlay lots (Air Rights & Tax Lots), and the associated Condos. When Condos are approved for ground lots, those lots remain in the production (active) layer and attributes updated to reflect the new condos. When Condos are approved for overlay lots, those lots are killed (dead lots) and archived to their respective history layer. Condo dwellings can also be queried city-wide via the individual VPM layers (active Record lots, dead Air Rights & Tax lots) where the value in the “UNDERLIES_CONDO” field is equal to 1.
Parcel Lots (ParcelsLotsPT, ParcelsLotsLN, ParcelsLotsPLY) - There is still land within the District of Columbia that has never been subdivided into either Record or Tax Lots through the two offices that manage land records (OS & RPTA), this land is referred to as Parcels, expressed as fractions (Ex Parcel 117/36). In this example, the number “36” would be the 36th out conveyance from original Parcel 117. The tracking of parcels was started in 1905 when, by Act of Congress, all the District’s unsubdivided properties which were mostly rural farms at the time were given parcel numbers. Their boundaries were also depicted (in many cases approximated), in large books in DOB's Office of the Surveyor. Until the late 1960s, building permits were routinely issued by the city for new construction on Parcels, but today all Parcels, like Tax Lots, must be converted into subdivision Lots of Record before permits will be issued for exterior work. Parcels are only found in the old “County of Washington,” north of Florida Ave and east of the Anacostia River. There are no Parcels found within the original city limits or Georgetown. Parcels are not in Squares. There are examples where parcel land may be physically located in the middle of a city Square, but Parcels are not considered part of a Square until they are duly subdivided by the D.C. Surveyor’s Office.
Record Lots - Record lots are defined by the Department of Buildings (DOB) – Office of the Surveyor (OS) - DC Surveyor. They are official, platted, recorded subdivision lots created by the D.C Surveyor’s Office in compliance with the Subdivision Ordinance of the District of Columbia (must have public street frontage, etc.). Typically, these lots are numbered 1 through 799 with no number being used more than once in a Square. Exceptions to this rule:
• When the 1-799 range has been exhausted within a square, the Surveyor’s Office assigns numbers from 1200 or may even use 8000 and above
• For reasons unknown, 42 Squares have record lot numbers greater than 799 but less than 1200 Additionally, in most case scenarios, a piece of property must be a Record Lot before a building permit will be issued for that site in the District of Columbia, and all proposed Record Lots are carefully reviewed by Zoning Administration officials for compliance with the city’s Zoning Ordinances. Other agencies that review new record lots besides OS are Office of Zoning, Office of Planning, the Dept. of Public Works, Historic Preservation, and DDOT.
Record lots are defined only when requested by property owners, normally when they are seeking a building permit. Record lots are recorded in Plat Books and Subdivision Books in the Office of the Surveyor. These documents are bound volumes of historical representations of the locations of property lines, and they include record dimensions, though typically no bearings of lines. These lots are located within squares, which usually correspond to one or two city blocks. Certain record lots can also be classified as “of-lots”. An "Of-Lot" is the D.C. Surveyor’s Office term for describing “Remaining/Part of Original Lot X”
In the record lot feature class, if a domain value of 1 resides in the “OF_LOT” field, you can assume that at one time the original lot was modified. Typically, any of these of-lots will also have a tax lot overlaying them since it is a piece or remainder of a Record Lot.
Tax Lots (TaxLotsPT, TaxLotsLN, TaxLotsPLY) - RPTA defines assessment and taxation lots, often referred to as A&T lots or simply tax lots. These lots are strictly for real estate taxation purposes and normally defined under two circumstances: • When property owners ask for their real property tax bills to be consolidated, after they have bought several contiguous record lots; this is called a combine;
• When part of a record lot is sold, but no new record lot is yet defined; this is called a split request. Tax lots are not determined by survey, and are therefore not official lots in the same way record lots are. These lots are normally numbered between 800 and 1999 within a square to differentiate them from record lots on the property tax maps. When a tax lot is established by RPTA, an A&T Plat is generated by RPTA and forwarded to the surveyor’s office. These A&T Plats are not reviewed but simply filed by the Surveyor; they do not comply with the standards required of subdivision plats, and are not recorded. Tax Lots are not normally acceptable when applying for building permits and must be converted to Record Lots through the normal subdivision process involving the D.C. Surveyor’s Office before permits will be issued. The only exception is if the lot does not face a public street. Furthermore, at the time of their creation and platting, there is no review made of tax lots for compliance with D.C. Zoning, Subdivisions or any other ordinances. These lots are simply pieces of property, owned by somebody, described in deeds, for which tax bills are sent and real estate taxes are collected by the city. Some Record Lots also function in this capacity. Geographically, tax lots typically overlay layers such as record lots or sometimes reservations. There are known instances where tax lots do not overlay these types of layers. Up until approximately 1972, A&T lots were only created by the Tax Assessor out of lands that had been previously Record Lots at some point in their history. For a short period of time in the early to mid 1970s, a decision was made to start eliminating fractional parcels (see definition below) and make them all into A&T lots. The intent was to do away with Parcels altogether and have all properties in the city be either tax lots or record lots. By doing this, they converted unsubdivided parcels into A&T lots where no underlying record lot exists. There is often little or no historical source information about these types of transactions therefore vectorizing them often required vast amounts of research.
Reservations - U.S. Reservations are lands acquired for use by the Federal Government after the original founding of the city. These were all acquired by the Federal Government through purchase, condemnation, dedication, or gift and almost all of the U.S. Reservations in Washington are under the Jurisdiction of the National Park Service. Unlike Appropriations, U.S. Reservations are found throughout the city. The National Park Service also has information for every U.S. Reservation and Appropriation in addition to DOB Office of the Surveyor having some detailed information on transactional history. It should be noted that RPTA has converted some reservations to tax lots for land tracking purposes however the federal government still maintains ownership in many of these cases.
Squares (SquaresPT, SquaresLN, SquaresPLY) - Squares are calculated by the outer extents of the record or tax lots within a defined area (typically a city block). There are roughly 4896 active squares. A Square is similar to a city block. Squares were numbered starting at 1 and are currently in the 6000 series. Not all squares are active. A common cause of squares becoming inactive has been through street closing and combining squares. When the squares are combined usually the lower square number is killed and the higher square number is used for the combined square. For example if squares 1 and 2 are combined, square 1 is killed and the combination becomes square 2.
Spatial Location of Squares
Each Square is an Island, alone unto itself. There is not now, and has never been, any citywide Survey Coordinate System in D.C. Most squares are unrelated to other Squares by “Measured.” They are related by Record. Street width is approximate. You cannot rely on the published official street widths to set up property lines or determine right-of-way. There is digital scan information available from DDOT regarding Right-of-Way. Some Squares are divided by streets. That is, the same Square continues on the other side of the street. Since there is no citywide Survey Coordinate System, squares were placed in their approximate location. This process is known as “best fit”.
Appropriations - U.S Appropriations are lands set aside at the time of the original founding and platting of the city for use by the U.S. Federal Government. The White House, for instance, Treasury Building, Ellipse, and Lafayette Square all sit on Appropriation No. 1. D.C General Hospital is on Appropriation No.13 (with the consent of the Federal Government). Appropriations are often confused with U.S Reservations but the two terms are not interchangeable. There are 17 U.S Appropriations in Washington, D.C., all of which are located within the limits of the Original City and, by definition; there can never be any more.
OwnerPly - Is a single polygon feature class that is built from various polygon feature classes of the Vector Property Mapping Program. The purpose of the layer is to represent all lands that are outside right-of-way. The Office of Tax and Revenue maintains a database known as Information Tax System (ITS) that contains the accounts for the real property taxes. ITS records reference record lots, tax lots, parcels, condominiums and federally owned lands such as reservations. Information from ITS is conflated to OwnerPly features by SSL (Square, Suffix and Lot). This ownership layer has a point for all properties including condominiums and un-taxed federal properties with selected tax assessment information attached as attributes. NOTE: the OwnerPly does not include condo records. These can be found in condo relate tables. This layer is regenerated WEEKLY with an automated algorithm using the latest Pubic Extract information for attribution. In March and September, the ITS Public Extract file is frozen for 4-5 weeks for processing during billing periods.
AlleyLns (AlleyLN, AlleyPLY) - Alley widths/ street frontages were captured during the vector property effort and reside in their own feature class. 99% of the time, these features should be coincident with the square boundary. The exceptions to this are internal alleys that might be overlaid by a tax lot. They were captured largely to enable continuity within each square. Alley Polygon does not exist. They could be created with this data by using an automated routine which searches linear feature of the Record, Tax and Parcel Lots feature classes where Line_Classification = 3, 4 and 6, then turning these selected lines into polys, another method would be clipping a square boundary with the tax and record lots.
Building Restriction Lns - These are lines beyond which property owners or others have no legal or vested rights to extend a building or any part thereof without approval of the proper authorities; ordinarily a line of demarcation between public and private property, but also applied to a building restriction line, when recorded in the records of the Surveyor.
Highway Planning Lns - There are lines that occurred on the city’s 1901-1905 set of master plans for all proposed roads. If a highway planning line crosses a particular property, that land cannot become a Record Lot by subdivision, even if the proposed street is no longer needed or will never be built. However there is a procedure through which a proposed road can be removed from the Highway Plan freeing up affected land for subdivision or development.
Public Easement Lns (PublicEasementsLN) - These are not to be confused with utility or private easements. They are often placed after an alley closing for traffic or access.
Esri ArcGIS 13.2.0.49743
Building Restriction Lines
2026-05-02T10:27:26
2005-01-01T00:00:00
Department of Buildings
Chief Building Official
<FULL AGENCY NAME WITHOUT ACRONYM>
1
-77.114121
-76.912008
38.995491
38.820454
Washington DC
2005-01-01T00:00:00
0.000000
0.000000
This data is used for the planning and management of Washington, D.C. by local government agencies.
<DIV STYLE="text-align:Left;"><DIV><DIV><P><SPAN>This work is licensed under a </SPAN><A href="https://creativecommons.org:443/licenses/by/4.0/" target="_blank" STYLE="text-decoration:underline;"><SPAN>Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License</SPAN></A><SPAN>.</SPAN></P></DIV></DIV></DIV>
Department of Buildings
Chief Building Official
<FULL AGENCY NAME WITHOUT ACRONYM>
external
3cf56e1fc8cc8205cbc5981374be7a2dd7af6e10
Office of the Chief Technology Officer
(202) 727-2277
200 I Street SE
Washington
DC
20003
US
dcgis@dc.gov
8:30 am - 5 pm
GIS Data Coordinator
GIS Data Coordinator
True
Office of the Chief Technology Officer
Last metadata review date: 09/21/2022
-Corrections to some data anomalies -Approx. 283 of the 800 maintenance transactions completed to bring data current. This equates to the retiring of 614 tax and record lots (these are in the history feature classes) and the creation of 364 new tax and record lots. - 49 new Parcels -Updated Maintenance transaction table
GIS Data Coordinator
Office of the Chief Technology Officer
202-727-5660
200 I Street SE, 5th Floor
Washington
DC
20001
US
dcgis@dc.gov
8:30am - 5:30pm
1.) Scan all index cards in the Office of the Surveyor The index cards show lot history and indicate which subdivision (Book and Page) or Assessment and Taxation (A&T) plat the lot was recorded. 2.) Digitally image all source material. Plats that were needed and necessary to construct active lots (Subdivisions, A&T etc) were digitally imaged and indexed for easy retrieval. 3.) Build "Comp Sheet" of each square. Comp sheets are a paper representation of each square with lots and dimensional information, lot number, and other specifications. Since each square contains multiple source documents, comp sheets allow staff to see the sqaure as one, pasted together map. This expedited the COGO stage. 4.) COGO Lots. Using customized COGO application, build linear features for each square that maintain much of the attribution seen on the plats. 5.) Post Process the data Customized process to dissolve on duplicate lines, build poly's and point, attach attribution, topology, and other attributes.
D.C. Office of the Chief Technology Officer
GIS Data Coordinator
(202) 727-5660
200 I Street SE, 5th Floor
Washington
DC
20003
US
dcgis@dc.gov
8:30 am - 5 pm
GIS Data Coordinator
location
Assessment and Taxation plats
Assessment and Taxation plats
2006-01-01
Office of the Chief Financial Officer - Real Property Tax Administration
map
http://ocfo.dc.gov
location
subdivision map
subdivision maps
2006-01-01
Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs - Office of Surveyor
map
http://dcra.dc.gov
- Appropriations: 10 of the 17 have been captured - Parcels: 81 new parcels. - Air Rights Lots: several additional lots retired and captured - Hundreds of new and retired record and tax lots (retired lots located in history layers) - Improved best fits around Grant Circle, parkland and railroads.
2007-08-31
GIS Data Coordinator
Office of the Chief Technology Officer
202-727-5660
200 I Street SE, 5th Floor
Washington
DC
20001
US
dcgis@dc.gov
8:30am - 5:30pm
70518
EPSG
5.3(9.0.0)
RECORDATION_DT
Recordation Date
Date
8
0
0
Recordation_DT is the date when a feature class were legally recorded. If the affected feature class is never recorded, this value should match the creation date. The initial vectorization has the same creation date and recordation date of roll out for all feature classes. Recordation date is meaningless for the feature classes that do not have a history such as all point features.
OCTO
NARRATIVE
Narrative
String
200
0
0
This attribute stores general comments about the feature.
OCTO
LOT
Lot
GUID
38
0
0
Lot number
OCTO
RETIREDBYRECORD
Retired By Record
GUID
38
0
0
DIRECTION
Direction
Double
8
38
8
DISTANCE
Distance
Double
8
38
8
RADIUS
Radius
Double
8
38
8
ARCLENGTH
Arc Length
Double
8
38
8
RADIUS2
Radius2
Double
8
38
8
COGOTYPE
COGO Type
Integer
4
10
0
ISCOGOGROUND
Is COGO Ground
Integer
4
10
0
ROTATION
Rotation
Double
8
38
8
SCALE
Scale
Double
8
38
8
CREATED_DATE
Created Date
Date
8
0
0
LAST_EDITED_DATE
Modified Date
Date
8
0
0
GLOBALID
GlobalID
GlobalID
38
0
0
STATUS
Status
Integer
4
10
0
The status value is always set to 1 which is the only value in the STATUS_CURRENT coded value domain. The value of this attribute is constant for a class. It denotes whether the information is considered current or historical. This attribute is primarily used by applications.
1
Feature is part of active layer
OCTO
SQUARE
Square
String
50
0
0
Square value from the SSL identifier.
OCTO
SUFFIX
Suffix
String
50
0
0
Suffix value from the SSL identifier.
OCTO
BuildingRestrictionLN_PF
Feature Class
70518
OBJECTID
OBJECTID
OID
4
10
0
Internal feature number.
ESRI
Sequential unique whole numbers that are automatically generated.
RECORD_BEARING_DIR
Record Bearing Direction
Integer
4
10
0
COMPUTED_LENGTH_FT
Cmputed Length Feet
Double
8
38
8
COMPUTED_BEARING_DIR
Computed Bearing Direction
Integer
4
10
0
COMPUTED_BEARING_ANGLE_DD
Computed Bearing Angle DD
Double
8
38
8
COMPUTED_DELTA_ANGLE_DD
Computed Delta Angle DD
Double
8
38
8
COMPUTED_ARC_LENGTH_FT
Computed Arc Length Feet
Double
8
38
8
COMPUTED_RADIUS_FT
Computed Radius Feet
Double
8
38
8
SHAPE
SHAPE
Geometry
8
0
0
Feature geometry.
ESRI
Coordinates defining the features.
RES
Reservation
String
50
0
0
PAR
Parcel
String
50
0
0
TYPE
Type
SmallInteger
2
5
0
Shape
Feature geometry
ESRI
Coordinates defining the features.
Shape
Date
8
0
0
KILL_DT
Kill Date
Double
8
38
8
Lot Date Killed
OCTO
COGOACCURACY
COGO Accuracy
SmallInteger
2
5
0
SE_ANNO_CAD_DATA
SE_ANNO_CAD_DATA
Blob
0
0
0
OFFSET
Offset
Double
0
0
0
Lot Offset
OCTO
SHAPE.LEN
SHAPE.LEN
String
40
0
0
Feature geometry
Esri
Simple
FALSE
70518
TRUE
FALSE