location-allocation problem

[SterlingFitzgerald]

I have a project where I would like to determine the best 4 (out of 12) emergency shelter locations based on residences that would likely need to evacuate (in this case bc they are located in a floodplain). I have three shapefiles which I thought I would be able to manipulate for Network Analysis. My files are:

possible emergency shelters     pes.shp (point)
residential evacuee's              res_evac.shp (polygon)
street file                             streets.shp (line)

I've tried a couple of things but I can't figure out how to create a new Network Dataset (in ArcCatalog). I currently get the message "there are no feature classes in the network container that can be added as feature sources."

I've looked all over the esri website and most of what I've found is only helpful after you have a network dataset to work with. What do I need to do to fix this problem?

Thanks

[SterlingFitzgerald]

well I found out once I moved my Feature to Point output file (residential polygons converted to points) it let me create a network database

Now I have a new problem, the shapefile with my resident locations does not intersect my street layer. Is there an easy way to snap my points to the street layer? I'm using ArcMap 10, so I can't use Hawth's tools

[DanLee]

The Snap tool (Editing toolbox; ArcEditor license) might be helpful.