1. Ideal Parcels Locator Script
By Heather Dean
I am pretending like I am looking for a home to buy, and would like to generate a list of ideal parcels
that I can keep an eye on in case they come up for sale. My requirements are that they are
in the RP Sports Complex neighborhood, that they are within ½ mile of a light rail station
so I can walk to the train quickly in the morning, and within ¼ mile of a park so I can take my dog to play.
I will perform a count on the number of parcels and list them out, trying to exclude the ones
without both street number and street address, and write these out to a separate text file.

2. General Script Processes
I started the script by defining the workspace
and creating variables for my next step.
I put print statements at the end of each step
so I could monitor the progress of the script
as I went along.
Python Shell

3. General Script Processes
Geoprocessing tasks can only be run
on feature layers, but I had
shapefiles!
Before I could create feature layers
out of the shapefiles, I put in code
to delete any pre-existing layers
of the same name.
I then created the feature layers.

4. General Script Processes
Next, I wanted to select all of the parcels in my desired neighborhood.
I did this by creating a query that indicated my desired neighborhood, which I then used in a
SelectLayerByAttribute script on the neighborhoods layer.
To transfer this selection to the parcels layer, I used an ‘intersect’ type SelectLayerByLocation script.
I received errors when I left the search distance field blank, so I just put in ‘0 FEET’.
That seemed to work fine.

5. General Script Processes
After creating a selection of the parcels in my desired neighborhood, I performed two
SelectLayerByLocation scripts to narrow the selection to parcels within ½ mile of a lightrail station and
¼ mile of a park. The programmer can select from currently selected features using the “SUBSET_SELECTION”
method.
Just for fun, I threw in a “GetCount” script. The count, 91, matched the count that I got
when I performed the same process in ArcMap.

6. General Script Processes
Now that all of the ideal parcels have been selected, I want to be able to view their addresses.
I accomplished this with a search cursor that would list them out for me.
I wrote this search cursor script from the example script in the textbook.

7. General Script Processes
As you can see in a selection of the result of the script
in my python shell on the right, some of the street address
fields didn’t show up. I tried rewriting my query several
times without an improved result.
The next step would be to move the list to a text file.

8. General Script Processes
First, I had to create a file that the
resulting text file would be written to.
I took this code snippet from ArcGIS Help
and played with it until I got it to do
what I wanted.

9. General Script Processes
On the right is the output text file opened in Notepad.
All of the pesky addresses without street numbers are there,
but the data is in a format that is manageable by any
non-GIS user.