McCracken County · Kentucky · pilot

We help you see McCracken on another level

Pick any location in the county. Parcel ID, street address, dropped pin, drawn polygon. We'll surface a deep dossier on it — legal stack, terrain, drainage, neighbors, every layer queryable — in less than a day.

That's the bar: full geometric depth on any spot in our service area, same-day turnaround. The two demos below were each delivered same-day, parcel resolution to live page — the bake itself is fast enough that the slow step is the writing, not the computing. McCracken is the pilot — 35,055 parcels we can light up the same way for any customer, on the same workflow whether the lot is a 0.14-acre downtown parcel or a 4,300-acre commercial corridor.

The two demos

Same workflow, two scales. One is an entire commercial corridor, the other a single downtown lot:

Toggle layers in either map: 3-inch ortho · OSM streets · dark base · parcel boundaries · roads · neighboring buildings · ridge-valley curvature · "tap to make it rain" drainage simulation. Both pages went from "let's do this AOI" to live URL in a couple of hours.

Outside the county, we've taken the same workflow over a different terrain class to prove the bake holds at scale: /turkey-bay — the OHV side of Land Between the Lakes (Trigg County), with gravity-mode terrain and a multi-mile trail strip.

The apps built on this stack

The demos above show the raw data model at specific AOIs. These are the iOS apps that make the same 35,055-parcel database usable on a phone — tap-first interfaces to the legal layer, terrain, flood risk, and crop history.

What we know about every parcel

35,055
parcels
68,043
owner records
33,317
2026 bills
9
tax districts

Legal layer

Parcel record
Boundary geometry, acreage, site address, legal description, deed reference, cartographic + voting district keys.
Ownership
Multi-year owner history with raw-name strings parsed and resolved to canonical entity IDs. Cross-county portability built in: "all properties owned by X across N counties" is one query.
Assessment
Land + improvement value, total assessed, classification, exemption status. Latest-value views and value-distribution histogram pre-computed.
Tax bills
Bill commitment, amount due, status, due date. Pay rails on a public L2 (USDC + ETH) plus fiat. Receipts mint as transferable proof tokens.
Adjacency
Bordering-parcel queries by spatial topology, plus AOI-bbox intersect for "what's inside this polygon."
Districts
City limits, fire, school, magisterial, special. Each district carries millage rates rolled up from the assessment side.

Physical layer

Aerial imagery
3-inch leaf-off ortho (state-flown, 2024) for the full county; 1-meter federal multi-year fallback. Historical aerial mosaic available for change detection.
LiDAR + DEM
60-cm bare-earth + surface elevation models, county-wide. Derived: hillshade, contours, slope, aspect, height-above-nearest-drainage as a flood proxy.
Canopy + structures
Per-pixel height model (surface − bare earth) at 60-cm resolution. Below 3 m reads as bare ground, 3–14 m as trees, above as built or unusually tall.
Topology tensor
A five-band raster of the surface's first and second derivatives. Reduces to ridge-valley curvature, gradient magnitude, peak/pit/saddle classification, aspect — whatever the question wants. Served as map tiles county-wide and at high resolution per AOI.
Drainage
Per-AOI flow-field bake with canopy and structures stamped as obstacles, so simulated drops deflect around tree crowns and buildings instead of ghosting through them. Powers the "tap to make it rain" interactive on both demos.
Buildings
Open-source footprint polygons, per-AOI clipped. Real heights come from the LiDAR side; footprints carry a known horizontal drift (1–3 m) so they're useful for "is there a building here" but not for sub-meter placement.
Roads
Federal road-centerline data with functional-class tags. Surface streets, dirt roads, named private drives — coverage varies by area.
Hydrography + land cover
Federal flowlines, waterbodies, basin polygons; multi-year land-cover and crop-type rasters at 30 m. Joined to parcels for waterway proximity and primary use.
Pipelines
Federal pipeline mapping (gas transmission, hazardous liquid, plus distribution where available). AOI-clipped on demand.

How a dossier gets made

Pick an AOI — by parcel ID, address, lat/lng radius, or a drawn polygon. Our service pulls the legal layer for the parcels in scope, then runs five layer bakes in sequence: vector overlay export, ortho clip, drainage flow field, ridge-valley map tiles, and a unified-map composition. The slow step is the drainage integration over a 60-cm grid; everything else is fast enough not to matter. From "give me a dossier on X" to a live page typically lands the same day.

The output is a self-contained asset bundle that drops into a templated page — every layer toggleable, every layer over the same base map, everything pannable and zoomable down to the inch.

Going deep on the geometry — 2D, 3D, and a little 4D

We don't stop at "the parcel exists and has these bounds." We interrogate it in every dimension we have:

In 2D

Polygon-level topology. A parcel's neighbors aren't just "what's listed in the tax roll" — they're everything that shares a line with this geometry, including unassessed rights-of-way. Public alleys don't have parcel IDs, so they don't appear in adjacency queries unless you look for them: small notches at lot corners, straight gaps that align across a block, narrow strips of un-deeded space between rows of lots. We caught one on the Broadway-315 demo — a 7-foot notch at the NW corner of the lot, marking where a Jefferson Street alley terminates against the rear boundary. Same query class surfaces shared driveways, encroachment, and platted-but-not-built easements.

In 3D — the tensor field

The LiDAR returns plus a baked tensor field of the surface. Bare-earth and surface elevation at 60-cm resolution, with a 5-band raster of the first and second derivatives layered on top: slope-x, slope-y, curvature-x, curvature-y, and the off-axis twist component.

Most "terrain" tooling stops at slope and aspect. The tensor field carries everything past that — peak, pit, ridge, valley, saddle — without re-deriving per query. Ask "where do ridges run? where are the saddles? which parcels straddle a watershed boundary? where does the surface change from convex to concave?" and you're reading off a single field, not running a new analysis. Parker's monkey-saddle (where three of the four parcels meet at a critical point with Hessian determinant ≤ 0) was found by clicking on the tensor layer and asking the field directly.

The drainage simulation stamps canopy and structure heights as obstacles before integrating, so simulated drops respect what's actually on the ground rather than ghosting through tree canopy or buildings. That's the "tap to make it rain" interactive on both demos.

In 4D — the time axis

Multi-year imagery (state-flown 2024 + earlier vintages), multi-year land cover, multi-year ownership, multi-year assessments. Change detection is mostly latent: nothing is automated yet, but the data is aligned and queryable per pixel and per parcel across vintages. "Did this parcel grow a structure between 2018 and 2024? Did the canopy here come down? Did ownership change in the gap year of an assessment?" are all single queries against the same model.

The point: "tensors or GTFO" isn't a vibe — it's the architectural commitment that produces sentences like "the alley off Jefferson is traceable as a 7-foot notch in 315's NW corner" or "Parker's three-parcel critical point is a true monkey saddle of index −2." Ordinary stacks can't answer those questions because they don't carry the second derivatives, the polygon detail, or the cross-vintage alignment.

What's not in there yet

Honest list:

The point

A property intelligence stack should answer questions, not hand back datasets. "What does my watershed look like, and which neighbors am I coupled to hydrologically?" is one question. So is "if a tax bill goes unpaid, what is the on-the-ground exposure — buildings, hardscape, canopy, drainage routes?" Both live in the same model. Ask us either one for any spot in the county and we'll have you a dossier the same day.

McCracken is the pilot. Sister counties — Ballard, Graves, Livingston, Marshall, Trigg, Lyon — come online next as we extend the same service westward.

Want a dossier on a specific spot, or this lit up for your service area? Fork Development Corp + Smol Nerd Farm — info@jays.bio.

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