Microsoft recently released 9.8 million building footprint data of 102 cities covering 44 US states to the OpenStreetMap community. This is a huge boost to improve the building data in many parts of the United States. Right now, we have ~ 19 million buildings already added by the community through imagery tracing and imports.

The most exciting part of this data is that all the footprints have height information. That means we can generate simple 3D buildings. I downloaded all the data and created a Mapbox style with 3D extrusion:

• Philadelphia (click here see the web map)

• Boston (click here see the web map)

• Baltimore (click here see the web map)

In general, the data is of good quality and will improve the building coverage in the US by 150%. But the quality may vary from city to city. Local mappers should evaluate each city before deciding to import.

Feel free to play with data, post your findings or screenshots of the data evaluation for the city you are interested in and let the community know how valuable this data is going to be for OpenStreetMap.

Code and step is available in Github repo: https://github.com/osmlab/ms-building-import/

* California not included in the tileset since OSM has fairly good coverage