What Palimap is
Palimap is an editable public map for the small American cities that have never had GIS at all — where zoning is a PDF, the ward map is a photocopy, and “who owns that lot?” lives in a courthouse filing cabinet. We assemble the whole picture from public data — parcels, zoning, wards, floods, sidewalks, traffic, the historic town showing through — as one living map anyone can read. Then anyone can draw on it: propose a park, redraw a district, sketch a trail, and share it as a link.
The name
Palimpsest + map. A palimpsest is a surface written on again and again, where the earlier writing still shows through. Where the records survive, the historic town shows through the modern one — the Sanborn fire-insurance maps sitting under today’s streets. That ghost layer isn’t decoration; it is the argument. A place is the sum of everything that has been written on it.
Two kinds of map, one tool
Palimap keeps two kinds of geography and never confuses them. That distinction is the whole idea.
Base layers — public truth
Parcels, streets, rail, buildings, hydrology, flood zones, census blocks. We prepare them once from public sources and don’t hand-edit them. If the record changes, we rebuild — the map answers to the source, not to us.
Scenarios — what you draw
A scenario is a small diff against that truth — “this parcel becomes a park” — never a copy of it. A few kilobytes, so it is a link you can send to a selectperson. The same drawing tool, pointed at a proposal instead of the base.
What we do
We build a town its map as a flat-fee build-out, then keep it live. 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. Because every layer is real data and not just a picture, you can ask the map plain-English questions: “how many children live within a ten-minute walk of a park?”
The result is public, fast, and needs no account to read. City staff, officials, and residents all look at the same map — which is rather the point.
What a build-out contains
Twenty-plus synchronized layers, each a question a town usually answers with a phone call, a records request, or a shrug:
- 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.
What we don’t try to do
We’re not your system of record. Palimap is the best working picture of your town, assembled from public data — not the legal authority for deeds, surveys, or boundaries. Where a source is a draft or reconstructed — zoning traced from a paper map — we label it a draft and draw uncertain lines honestly.
We don’t hide the map behind a login. Reading any live map is free and needs no account. We don’t meter your staff or charge by the seat.
We don’t pretend the hard parts are automatic. Two things genuinely vary town to town — parcels (some states publish them freely, some counties sell them) and zoning (often hand-traced from evidence). We do that labor rather than skip it, and we tell you which is which.
We don’t lock you in. Your scenarios are plain diffs and shareable links, and the base is public data anyone can verify.
Want Palimap for your town?
Tell us where — small cities first, the ones the big vendors never call back.
Suggest your cityPalimap is a trade name of Go Be Strong LLC.