The map your city never had.
Most small American cities have no GIS at all. Zoning is a PDF, the ward map is a photocopy, and “who owns that lot?” lives in a courthouse filing cabinet. Big vendors never call back. Palimap builds the whole picture — one living, public map — for a flat monthly fee, no setup charge, and nothing for your staff to install.
Public Maps: what a build-out contains
Twenty-plus synchronized layers, each a question your city currently answers with a phone call, a records request, or a shrug — for unlimited staff and residents:
- Parcels & valuesWho owns what, and what is an acre worth here?
- Zoning districtsWhat may be built where — drawn from evidence when the official map is paper-only.
- Wards & polling placesWho represents this block, and where do they vote?
- Building footprintsWhat stands on every lot — and which lots stand empty.
- Flood zonesWhat does FEMA already know about this parcel?
- Parks & public spaceHow many children live within a walk of a park?
- Sidewalks & trailsHow much of town can you actually walk?
- Traffic countsWhich corridors carry the town, ten years deep.
- Fatal crashesWhere people have died on the roads — and who was on foot.
- Tax-forfeited landWhich lots the state already owns for unpaid taxes — abandonment's paper trail.
- Historic Sanborn mapsWhat stood here in 1886, showing through today's streets.
- Rail, water, wells, soils, contoursThe ground truth everything else stands on.
Ask the map
Because every layer is real data and not just a picture, the map can answer questions: “How many children live within a ten-minute walk of a park?” “How many homes sit in the 100-year floodplain?” Today we run these for you as part of a build-out; self-serve for city staff is rolling out.
Public Works: requests from residents
Add Public Works and residents can report a pothole, a downed tree, or an abandoned vehicle by emailing a photo. Palimap reads the location, classifies the problem, and puts it on your map in a dashboard your crews can triage and route — the civic engagement channel a small town could never staff.
How a build-out works
Most of the picture comes from national data — census, FEMA, USGS, Overture, OpenStreetMap, the Library of Congress — and lands the same way in every state. Two things honestly vary: parcels (some states publish them freely, some counties sell them) and zoning (often a paper map we reconstruct from evidence — and we label drafts as drafts).
The result is public, fast, and needs no account to read. City staff, selectpersons, and residents all look at the same map — which is rather the point. Priced as a flat monthly subscription by population; see pricing.