Estate Atlas: SD-MCP

The first and only Model Context Protocol server for the San Diego Municipal Code — built so any AI agent (Claude, Cursor, custom) can query SD's regulatory data with citations, freshness guarantees, and machine-readable structure that no government source publishes.

Status: v0.1 — pilot. Read-only. STDIO transport. Maintained by Estate Atlas. Powered by the same fresh data pipelines used by our property-intelligence product. Embeddings: Voyage AI voyage-4-large — Anthropic's embedding partner.

What you can ask it

> "What are the fence height rules for an RS-1-7 lot?"
> "Show me all the active permits on APN 535-095-05-00."
> "What's the rear setback for RM-1-1?"
> "Find bulletins about ADUs."
> "When was the municipal code last updated?"

Related MCP server: Dilix MCP

Tools

Every response includes a _meta envelope with source, data_as_of, freshness_sla, citations (with PDF page anchors where available), and license. This is the differentiator — no government source publishes machine-readable freshness or citations.

Install

Claude Desktop

Edit your Claude Desktop config at ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "sandiego-municipal-code": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": ["sandiego-municipal-code-mcp"],
      "env": {
        "SANDIEGO_MCP_DATABASE_URL": "postgresql://readonly@db.estateatlas.ai/sandiego_public",
        "SANDIEGO_MCP_VOYAGE_API_KEY": "pa-..."
      }
    }
  }
}

Restart Claude Desktop. You should see "sandiego-municipal-code" in the MCP indicator.

Claude Code

In ~/.claude/settings.json or a project .mcp.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "sandiego-municipal-code": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": ["sandiego-municipal-code-mcp"],
      "env": {
        "SANDIEGO_MCP_DATABASE_URL": "postgresql://...",
        "SANDIEGO_MCP_VOYAGE_API_KEY": "pa-..."
      }
    }
  }
}

Cursor / Continue / Other MCP-aware tools

Use the same JSON above; check your editor's MCP docs for the config path.

From source (development)

git clone https://github.com/estate-atlas/sandiego-mcp
cd sandiego-mcp
uv venv --python 3.11
uv pip install -e ".[dev]"
.venv/bin/sandiego-municipal-code-mcp  # runs server over STDIO

Environment variables

Public read-only database (coming soon)

The hosted endpoint db.estateatlas.ai/sandiego_public will provide free, rate-limited access to all the data this MCP server exposes. Until that ships, you can:

1. Run your own Supabase replica with the schemas under david/backend/db/

2. Email hello@estateatlas.ai for a private beta credential

Data sources + refresh cadence

Refresh is automated via GitHub Actions in the upstream Estate Atlas data repo. The MCP server source code lives at estate-atlas/sandiego-mcp.

Roadmap

• v0.1 (now) — STDIO transport, 11 tools, read-only, BYO DB credentials

• v0.2 — Public read-only hosted endpoint (free tier + rate limit)

• v0.3 — Court rulings ingestion (CourtListener integration)

• v1.0 — Hosted HTTP/SSE transport, bearer-token auth, billing tiers

• v1.x — San Diego County → other CA cities → other states

License

MIT. Municipal data is public-domain (City of San Diego). The MCP envelope, citations layer, and freshness SLA are © Estate Atlas.

Citing

If your agent's output is consumed for any regulatory or legal decision, the _meta.citations[] field gives you the verifiable source. We recommend always surfacing source_pdf_url to the human consumer.