Support
Help with the app, the data, and alerts.
Most questions we get are about why a particular project is or isn't showing up. Those are answered below. If yours isn't, email us — a person reads it.
What this app is
Build Your City maps proposed development in the Inland Empire — warehouses, housing, solar, infrastructure — using public filings from CEQAnet, the State of California's clearinghouse for environmental review. It covers Riverside and San Bernardino counties. Everything shown is a public record; we collect none of it ourselves and we are not affiliated with any city, county, or state agency.
Why a project isn't on the map
Roughly half the filings we hold have no coordinates attached, so there is nothing to place a pin at. This is not something we left out — CEQAnet did not reliably publish coordinates until the mid-2010s, and a filing from 2003 usually has none. The practical effect is smaller than that sounds. Nearly every project currently open for public comment does have coordinates, so the map is close to complete for anything you can still act on. What is missing is mostly the archive: old filings that were approved or abandoned years ago. Projects without coordinates are still tracked. They simply cannot be shown on a map or found by searching near you.
The city on a project looks wrong
The city comes from whatever the lead agency typed into its filing, and that text is often a description rather than a name — "Riverside, Unincorporated", or a list of every city a regional plan touches. We normalise those to a single city name where we can. Where a filing describes unincorporated county land, there is no city to show, because the project is not in one — it is reviewed by the county. If a project is genuinely attributed to the wrong city, tell us and include the SCH number from the project page.
How alerts work
There are two kinds, and they work differently. Email alerts follow a city. You pick one, confirm your address, and get a message when projects in that city change status. Notifications in the iOS app follow distance instead. If you allow notifications, the app alerts you when a project near you — roughly fifteen miles — opens for public comment, and again shortly before that comment period closes. It does not matter which city the project is in. Both are optional, and the app works fully without either.
Turning alerts off
Every email includes a one-click unsubscribe link. It works immediately and does not require an account or a reply. iOS notifications are turned off in Settings → Build Your City → Notifications. Turning them off stops them at once; you do not need to reinstall or contact us.
Something looks wrong
We would rather hear about it than not. Wrong status, wrong location, a project that should be here and isn't, or an address that points somewhere odd — email us with the SCH number, which appears on every project page. Worth knowing first: we publish filings as the state publishes them. If a project's details look wrong in our app, they are often wrong in the source filing too, and we will tell you when that is what we find.
Contact
privacy@buildycity.com — for support questions, corrections, privacy questions, and data deletion requests alike. There are no accounts, so if you are writing about an email subscription it helps to include the address you signed up with.