According to building permit activity in the past 30 days there are more demolitions on the North Side than on the South Side, but most of those will have new buildings. Map by Chicago Cityscapen using Mapbox satellite imagery.
I review the new permits each day on Chicago Cityscape, both in the list and map views, to get a sense of what’s being built around the city. This keeps me informed so I can tweet interesting permits, respond to people’s questions several times a week, and even help out on a Moxie tour of Motor Row and the Cermak Green Line station by mention new construction and renovation permits I’ve seen pop up nearby.
This week I was poking around the Demolitions Tracker and saw that, not unusually, there were a lot of houses being demolished on the South Side. So I checked out a 30-day view of demolitions in the full-screen map that shows the entire city.
While the North Side has more demolitions going on than the South Side, most of them are part of teardowns – the demolished buildings are getting replaced or allowing for expansion. Demolitions on the South Side are much less likely to have associated new construction projects than the North Side.
Tina Fassett Smith tweeted back:
@stevevance @ChiBuildings Yup. I spent 4 months mapping thousands of permits showing 6 years of demo/new bldg activity. Same as it ever was.
— Tina Fassett Smith (@tfas) March 18, 2015