Parcels: Latent Information and Place-Based Participation
Public records contain rich information about idle land. Most people who walk past that land every day have no idea. We built a small system to close that gap.
Every city has parcels that sit.
Vacant lots behind chain-link. Shuttered storefronts on otherwise busy blocks. Land that shows up in county assessor records as active, with an APN and a zoning designation and a legal owner, but that reads to everyone who walks past it as just — nothing.
The information about these places exists. It’s public. It’s just not accessible in any form that helps people act on it.
That gap — between technically public and practically usable — is where a lot of civic work lives. This is one attempt to close it.
What we built
Parcels is a place-based interface for civic participation in Vacaville, CA.
Each parcel in the system has:
- A dedicated page with its actual boundary drawn on a map, from assessor data
- Real county records: APN, acreage, zoning classification, parcel type
- A public feedback form asking a simple question: what would you like to see here?
- Share buttons so a neighbor can send the page to another neighbor
The current list is small — six parcels, all clustered around the Parker/Cernon/Merchant intersection in historic downtown Vacaville. A vacant retail space on Merchant Street. An empty lot for sale on an adjacent block. A shuttered office building on Cernon.
Real places. Real data. Real vacancy.
The five-part system
The project is an attempt to build something repeatable, not just a one-off map. The logic has five parts.
Collect — public feedback on what people want to see at specific places. Not a general survey. A specific question about a specific lot on a specific street. The feedback form is embedded on each parcel page, powered by Touchpoints.
Surface — latent information already in public records. Ownership, zoning, vacancy classification, parcel history. This information exists in county assessor shapefiles and is technically public. We converted Solano County’s assessor shapefile (33,089 parcels, NAD83 State Plane projection) to GeoJSON, filtered to active parcels by APN, and serve a small subset as a static layer. The full county parcel map exists in a development-only view. Six parcels are live.
Share — that information openly, so anyone can see what’s there. Each parcel has a permanent URL. The share buttons are deliberate: the intent is for neighbors to send pages to other neighbors, for local business owners to tag city council members, for people with aligned interests to find each other around a specific place.
Connect — places to people whose aligned interests can bring a parcel to life. This is the speculative part. The hypothesis is that if enough people express the same preference about the same place — we need a grocery store here, not another parking lot — that signal becomes legible to decision-makers in a way that one person saying it at a planning commission meeting does not.
Act — turn signal into outcomes. Proposals. Partnerships. Projects. This is where the experiment has to prove itself. We don’t have examples yet. That’s honest.
What we mean by latent information
The Solano County assessor’s shapefile is a public record. It contains the boundary of every parcel in the county. It contains ownership information, zoning, acreage, and use classification.
Most people don’t know this data exists. Most of the people who know it exists don’t know how to work with a shapefile. Most of the people who can work with a shapefile have never thought to connect it to a feedback form and a shareable URL.
That’s the gap. Not a policy gap. Not a data gap. A translation gap.
Parcels is a translation layer. Take county assessor data. Convert it to GeoJSON. Render it on a Leaflet map. Give each parcel a page. Ask a question.
The underlying data was always there. The interface is what was missing.
Why upstream matters
Most land use participation happens downstream.
A developer files plans. A planning commission hearing is scheduled. Notice goes out — often by mail, to addresses within a specified radius. A meeting happens on a Tuesday night. Three people show up. The project proceeds or doesn’t.
By the time a parcel reaches a public hearing, the developer has spent months on entitlement work. The window for meaningful input is narrow. The form of participation — public comment at a dais, three minutes, address the chair — is not designed for nuanced community preference.
Parcels is an attempt to move upstream. Before anyone files an application. Before any investment is made in a specific vision for a site.
The question “what would you like to see here?” is most valuable when the answer can still shape what happens. That means asking it early — before the plans are drawn, before the variance is filed, before the public hearing notice goes out.
What this project is not
This project is not endorsed by the City of Vacaville. It is not endorsed by or coordinated with the property owners of the parcels listed.
We are using publicly available assessor records to create a public-interest interface. Civic Studio’s view is that this is a natural extension of public data — data that was collected by a public agency, funded by public resources, and designated as a public record.
We are not making claims about what should happen to any specific parcel. We are creating a space for residents to express preferences and for that expression to accumulate into something visible.
What we’ve learned so far
The data pipeline was harder than expected, and the result is more legible than expected.
Converting the county shapefile to a usable GeoJSON layer required coordinate reference system conversion (NAD83 State Plane CA Zone II to WGS84), parcel matching by APN, and filtering from 33,000+ records to the handful we wanted to display. That work is done once and serves every parcel page.
The individual parcel pages — with actual polygon boundaries from assessor data, not just a pin on a map — communicate something different than a list or a map alone. You can see the shape of the space. You can see what’s adjacent. The boundary makes the parcel feel real in a way an address doesn’t.
We built a development tool into the full parcel map: click any inactive parcel, get a modal with ready-to-paste JSON to add it to the active list. It lowers the barrier to growing the dataset without requiring anyone to hand-edit a file with 33,000 records.
What comes next
The honest answer is: we’re watching.
If people use the feedback forms, the signal will be there. If it isn’t, we’ll learn something about the limits of the format.
If feedback clusters around specific sites, the next step is bringing it to city staff — not as advocacy for a particular outcome, but as evidence that community attention exists and has a shape.
The longer-term vision is a city where participation doesn’t require attending a Tuesday night meeting. Where “what do you want here?” is a standing question, always open, always accumulating signal, attached to specific places in the world.
Parcels is a small experiment toward that.