Q:

Counting building polygons in neighborhood polygons

I have two layers, one of them is neighborhood data and the other is the buildings in the city. I want to count the buildings in a neighborhood (by using borders) and add this value to the neighborhood table as a field. How can I do this in ArcMap?

A:

You will want to use a spatial join. The easiest way to do this is (IMO) is by right-clicking the neighborhood (polygon) layer and selecting Joins and Relates -> Join and then at the top (where it says "what do you want to join to this layer") change from tabular join to a spatial join (based on spatial location). Select your point layer. Then you have options for statistics you want for any numeric fields in your point layer but you always get a COUNT field added in your output which is what you wanted. Hope that helps.
You can also do this using the spatial join tool in the Overlay Toolbox within Analysis tools.

