The neighborhood boundaries on this site are our own editorial definitions, not official government boundaries. We built them from the strongest sources we could find, we explain every judgment call, and you can tell us when we have a line in the wrong place.
Why we had to draw our own
We looked for official polygons for Downtown neighborhoods and, for most of them, they do not exist. The City of Los Angeles publishes Community Plan Areas, but Downtown is a single shape with no internal neighborhoods. The Los Angeles Times “Mapping LA” project, which many sites rely on, contains only “Downtown”, “Chinatown” and “South Park” for our area, with no Arts District, Historic Core, Little Tokyo or Jewelry District at all.
Business Improvement Districts do have precise official boundaries with the right names, but a BID is a funding district, not a neighborhood. We tested this: the official Arts District BID excludes roughly half of the businesses everyone agrees are in the Arts District, because they sit just outside the assessed area. Using a BID as a neighborhood would wrongly shut real Arts District businesses out of the Arts District.
So we draw our own, and we say so plainly on every page that uses them.
The sources we use, in order
- Official City of Los Angeles planning or GIS data
- Business Improvement District boundaries
- Neighborhood council and recognized district maps
- Major streets, freeways, parcels and physical boundaries such as the Los Angeles River
- OpenStreetMap, only as a secondary reference
A stronger source always wins. OpenStreetMap, in particular, never overrides an official boundary; we use it only to cross-check.
How a business gets a neighborhood
Every business has a verified street address, which we turn into map coordinates and test against our neighborhood polygons. Each business ends up with:
- One primary neighborhood, or none if the evidence does not support one.
- Downtown Los Angeles as the parent area, always.
- An optional “near” note when a business sits close to another neighborhood’s edge.
- A confidence level: confirmed, approximate, disputed or unresolved.
When two credible sources genuinely disagree, we say the assignment is disputed and explain the disagreement on the listing, rather than pretending to a certainty we do not have. When no credible source assigns a neighborhood at all, we leave the business under Downtown Los Angeles instead of guessing.
What we record for every boundary
Each neighborhood polygon is saved as a versioned file that records the sources consulted, the date it was created or last updated, and a written explanation of any judgment calls. When we change a boundary we keep the previous version, so the history is never lost.
Tell us if we are wrong
Neighborhood lines are genuinely contested, and people who live and work here know things a map does not. If you think a business is in the wrong neighborhood, or a boundary is drawn badly, use the boundary feedback form and tell us what you would change and why. We read all of it.
Related: editorial standards · corrections policy