This is a modification of the MTC 2020 Land Use layer provided to SFEI by MTC. SFEI has collaborated with MTC to add additional fields that provide important information for water quality scientists and modelers. The first comprehensive information on Bay Area land use was released by ABAG in 1995, updated in 2000, and again in 2005 to reflect the (then) latest information about land use on a parcel basis. The 2005 dataset has since been used for a wide range of applications (both inside and outside of ABAG), most of which it was never designed to support. This 2020 MTC Land Use layer is meant to provided updated data and be designed to better support the wide range of modeling and GIS analyses that have made use of previous version of the later.
Fields added by SFEI
mtc_generalized_land_use_2005
This field crosswalks current land use categories to the same land use categories used in the 2005 MTC Land Use dataset.
Right_of_Way (SFEI)
The empty space between parcels were holistically classified with the existing use code of 11 (Pipeline or Right-of-Way). While this was a simple solution to enable classification across the entire Bay Area, due to variable quality of parcel data from the various counties, further refinement was needed before input into the watershed modeling. One of the initial issues was the coverage this classification had within Baylands and tidal waters of San Francisco Bay. These parcels were converted to a “Water” classification where they had greater than 25% overlap with Water or Wetland classes from the 2019 NLCD. Typically most major highways are given a value of "1", and smaller surface streets were given the value of "2" where there is less certainty, but still significant likelihood that these areas represent true Right-of-Way areas.
Note that in a change from v1.0 to v1.1 (January, 2026) the following fields have been removed as they were causing confusion with official regulatory definitions of old industrial: Old_Industrial, Maher_Ordinance, Historical_Industrial, and Current_Industrial_Pre_1978.
San Francisco Estuary Institute (SFEI). 2026. "SFEI Enhanced MTC 2020 Land Use v1.1" Accessed [date retrieved]. https://www.sfei.org/data/sfei-enhanced-mtc-2020-land-use
This file is part of SFEI_Enhanced_MTC_2020_LandUse.
SFEI_Enhanced_MTC_2020_LandUse is free data: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
SFEI_Enhanced_MTC_2020_LandUse is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
More information about GNU General Public License is available at http://www.gnu.org/licenses/. This dataset "SFEI_Enhanced_MTC_2020_LandUse" is available without restriction upon use with the following caveats. Prudent usage, knowledge of the data quality, and professional courtesy should all be considered in obtaining and using this data. As this dataset is NOT a survey document, neither use it as such nor use it beyond the limits of the source scale. Please read and fully comprehend all available metadata prior to data use. SFEI requests that the use of these data in any map, publication, or report should include citation of the data source(s) used and give proper attribution and credit to the originators of the data. Questions about SFEI data may be directed to the GIS Manager, at 510-746-7334.
