Month: October 2016

chicago’s affordable housing landscape

Posted on by jsarias

The below map uses data on Chicago affordable housing developments from the city’s Open Data Portal. To build the map, I differentiated housing projects into 4 categories: multifamily, senior, supportive or other. These are respectively represented by red, blue, green, and gray markers.

What types of affordable housing developments are located where?

The spatial pattern most apparent to me is the high concentration of multi-family affordable housing in the West and South Sides of Chicago, with a smaller cluster in the north lakefront neighborhood of Uptown. By contrast, senior housing is a bit more evenly spread throughout the city, such as in the farther Northwest sides of the city. I’d assume because it’s politically and socially deemed more acceptable to have senior housing nearby, and therefore, there are less NIMBY opponents to its construction. Supportive housing developments seem to also be somewhat clustered in areas with higher multifamily concentration, save for a small cluster in the Far South side.

 

mapping new construction in chicago

Posted on by jsarias

New Construction Building Permits in Chicago (2006 to present)

The map below shows the spatial distribution of new construction in Chicago from 2006 through 2016. It also shows the total number of new construction permits within each Chicago Community Area.

Insights

Between both layers of the above map, the uneven characteristic of new construction in Chicago is readily apparent. In particular:

  • New construction is most heavily concentrated in the Loop and neighborhoods just west, northwest, and north of it. While several community areas had substantial new construction outside of this central node, the 9 communities with total new construction permits above 500 were all concentrated in this cluster from the Loop and the Near West Side all the way up to Logan Square and North Center.
  • The most intensive construction activity has been seen in West Town. With only 81,432 residents in 2010, West Town accounted for about 3% of the city’s total population (2.7 million). Yet looking at new construction activity (as measured by construction permits), West Town had the greatest number of permits approved from 2006 to 2016: 1,387 (or 8.5% of permits city-wide). This level of new construction is greater than that of the 28 communities with the fewest permits This hyper development activity seems to correlate with local narratives around displacement pressures, and may offer a partial explanation as to why West Town also saw some loss of Latino population.
  • The lowest levels of construction are clustered in the Far Southwest and Far South Sides. Though several communities scattered across the Northwest and West sides had lower levels of new construction, the most significant clusters of communities without development occurred along the southwest edges of the city, as well as the far South Side.
  • Construction slowed from roughly 2009 to 2012. While not a surprising insight, the torque layer of the map also clearly shows the degree to which construction activity varied over time. In particular, it illustrates a low level of permit activity beginning just before 2009 and not really picking up again until 2012, before really booming again in 2013. A closer analysis of select time periods within the 10 year span documented here can help show which neighborhoods have become local ‘hot spots’ of construction at different points in time.

Data Details

I accessed Chicago’s building permits data (which is updated daily) on October 5th, 2016. Filtering for only those related to new construction, the city approved a total of 17, 121 new construction permits since January 2006. I then dropped any entry that didn’t have geospatial data, or any information about amount paid for permit or estimated cost of final construction. This left me with a final dataset of 16,303.

Source: City of Chicago Data Portal, Building Permits (Jan. 1, 2006 to present). Accessed on Oct. 5, 2016. Link: https://data.cityofchicago.org/Buildings/Building-Permits/ydr8-5enu/data

* NOTE: For a comparison to the issuance of demolition permits over the same time period, see map below (which I was able to simply tweak the code I wrote for the above analysis to access). Note that demolitions were also high in the same cluster where new construction permits were issued, yet the south side neighborhoods of Englewood and West Englewood also saw high levels of demolitions following the Great Recession.