Spatial join issue/question

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11-18-2015 07:49 PM
PhillipWarsaw
New Contributor

Hello,

This is my first time posting here, and I am pretty new to using ArcMap, so forgive me if I ramble and/or am unclear. I am currently working on a project investigating home sale prices and their relationship to local amenities, and I have run into an issue when trying to perform a spatial join. Here is what I have/have done so far:

- I have a shapefile containing every parcel of land in the city I am investigating. To this I have joined excel files containing land use information for each parcel, along with the sales price for residential parcels that sold in the year I am considering.

- I created a separate layer only containing those parcels that represent home sales along with their parcel information (size, etc)

- I also downloaded a Census Block shapefile from the TIGER/Line site, and joined basic demographic information to this shapefile.

My current task is trying to join this demographic data to the home sales so that for each home sale I have the parcel information along with demographic data for the neighborhood it is in. Given that I do not have a common attribute to match, my impression is that a spatial join is the best way to accomplish this. I went through the geoprocessing menu, and used the spatial join tool there. It seems to have succeeded (it says that each home transaction has a match), but all of the other fields are either blank or zero. I have tried the following to troubleshoot, and none of it has worked:

- Check that each layer is using the same coordinate system

- Tried the spatial join both ways (switching each layer as the target layer)

- Double checked that are no transactions which are not being matched

- Using the broader shapefile that I originally downloaded as the target file

- Change the merge condition (I've used both "intersect", which generate no missing matches, and "within" which left me with parcels that didn't match)

At this point I am at a loss for how to proceed. I've looked through texts both online and at my library and it isn't clear to me what I am doing wrong. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

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PhillipWarsaw
New Contributor

Mitch,

I tried to use the append tool. I am not sure if I am using it correctly, but I was unable to make it work. However, I tried a spatial join by right clicking on my home sales, choosing "join" and then attempting a spatial join from there. It was not perfect, as some of the fields did not carry over, but I was able to then attribute join to the home sales again to bring in the rest of the fields. I am still unsure as to why it is being so finicky, and could still use some help troubleshooting, but it seems to be a temporary fix.

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2 Replies
MitchHolley1
MVP Regular Contributor

Hey Phillip,

Try using the Append (Data Management) tool. 

This may help.

Please let me know if it works.

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PhillipWarsaw
New Contributor

Mitch,

I tried to use the append tool. I am not sure if I am using it correctly, but I was unable to make it work. However, I tried a spatial join by right clicking on my home sales, choosing "join" and then attempting a spatial join from there. It was not perfect, as some of the fields did not carry over, but I was able to then attribute join to the home sales again to bring in the rest of the fields. I am still unsure as to why it is being so finicky, and could still use some help troubleshooting, but it seems to be a temporary fix.