Which properties FEMA puts in the floodplain
One row per parcel FEMA's flood map has a finding about, ordered by county, city and address. This is the one file here that is not limited to commercial property: it is drawn from all 1.13 million parcels in the seven counties, because the floodplain is mostly houses, vacant land and back lots. A Special Flood Hazard Area is the 1% annual chance floodplain, and it is the line that changes what a lender requires — the rest of the file is the 0.2% band, which is mapped but carries no such requirement. The zone code and the zone name travel together on purpose, because FEMA writes the letter X for two different findings and only the name separates the 0.2% band from open country outside the floodplain.
The file
28,354 parcels · 21,214 in a Special Flood Hazard Area · 11 FEMA did not place
28,354 rowsCounties in this file: Anoka, Carver, Dakota, Hennepin, Ramsey, Scott, Washington · 14 columns available · free, no account, no rate limit.
Joins to an address on lat, lon, so it can be pointed at one property rather than read whole.
What the rows look like
10 real rows from this file, spread evenly across it rather than taken off the top — every file here is written in some order, so its first rows are never a fair sample of it. These are the default columns, which is what the download button hands over.
| address | city | county | FEMA zone | what that zone means | in a Special Flood Hazard Area | assessed value |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| — | Andover | Anoka County, Minnesota | AE | 1% annual chance flood, base elevation set | true | 86,500 |
| — | Columbus | Anoka County, Minnesota | A | 1% annual chance flood, no base elevation set | true | 48,000 |
| — | Lino Lakes | Anoka County, Minnesota | AE | 1% annual chance flood, base elevation set | true | 23,500 |
| 1440 RIVERPOINTE Road | Watertown | Carver County, Minnesota | AE | 1% annual chance flood, base elevation set | true | 340,900 |
| 2661 BROOKDALE LA N | Brooklyn Park | Hennepin County, Minnesota | AE | 1% annual chance flood, base elevation set | true | 178,900 |
| 5688 LINDA LA | Greenfield | Hennepin County, Minnesota | A | 1% annual chance flood, no base elevation set | true | 676,800 |
| 113 DEERWOOD LA N | Plymouth | Hennepin County, Minnesota | AE | 1% annual chance flood, base elevation set | true | 372,500 |
| 284 Spring Street | Saint Paul | Ramsey County, Minnesota | AE | 1% annual chance flood, base elevation set | true | 4,600 |
| 3786 River Road South | Afton | Washington County, Minnesota | X | 0.2% annual chance flood (500-year band) | false | 1,102,400 |
| 9550 Lake Road | Woodbury | Washington County, Minnesota | A | 1% annual chance flood, no base elevation set | true | 503,800 |
An em dash means the record is blank, and that is the source's gap rather than ours. Across the whole file: address is blank on 23.3% of rows, assessed value is blank on 1.0% of rows.
The cuts of this file
Every cut is the same columns, filtered. Pick one and the row count changes; the file does not.
Every column in this file
Columns marked default come down unless you pick your own with
&columns=.
| Column | What it is | In the default file |
|---|---|---|
address |
address | default |
city |
city | default |
county |
county | default |
flood_zone |
FEMA zone | default |
flood_zone_name |
what that zone means | default |
in_sfha |
in a Special Flood Hazard Area | default |
assessed |
assessed value | default |
base_flood_elev |
base flood elevation (ft) | optional |
build_yr |
year built | optional |
shaded_band |
0.2% band, not an SFHA | optional |
not_placed_by_fema |
FEMA's map did not place it | optional |
pin |
parcel id | optional |
lat |
latitude | optional |
lon |
longitude | optional |
Where it comes from
FEMA National Flood Hazard Layer · Public domain (17 U.S.C. §105 — a work of the United States Government) · parcel geometry and addresses from the seven county assessors
This source does not stamp the day it was published, so we cannot honestly date our copy of it and will not guess. The period the records themselves cover is on the system card.
What this layer cannot answer is stated in full on the system card — read it before quoting a figure.
What you may do with it
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). Share it, change it, build a product on it, sell that product — all fine. The one condition is credit: say it came from Brick & Mortar and link back.
Records published by Federal Emergency Management Agency, county GIS offices. A work of the United States government, which is not subject to copyright protection in the U.S. (17 U.S.C. § 105).
Read the full licence · how we license every dataset, and the two we do not
Without the page
/api/export?dataset=flood&format=csv returns the
same file. Call /api/export
with no arguments for the whole catalogue.
Point an AI at it
Every file carries its own source, its capture date and the layer's own warnings in the header, so a model reading one gets the caveats with the numbers rather than the numbers alone. Paste this at an assistant that can fetch a URL:
Read https://brickandmortar.dev/api/export?dataset=flood&format=csv
Everything above the header row is provenance and limits. Read it first,
then answer using only what the rows support.llms.txt describes the whole warehouse the same way — what each dataset holds, which counties it really covers, and what it cannot answer.