Category: Government

Top 20 most active general contractors in Chicago this year so far

May 15, 2014 / / 28 Comments

River Point tower is under construction at 444 W Lake Street by James McHugh Construction. Its associated building permit, which only comprises the base/train cover structure depicted, has an estimated project cost of $27,050,000. Photo by Bart Shore.

Here I go again not talking about urban planning on Steven Can Plan. With my Licensed Chicago Contractors & Construction Activity website I’ve ingested a lot of data from the City of Chicago’s open data portal that has a LOT to say about what’s going on.

Nearly all permits include a reasonable value that estimates the project’s cost – like $13,150,000.00 for converting Lafayette Elementary School into a performing arts high school. (All demolition permits show $1 and some permits cost over $6 billion, which we know is false.)

I recently reorganized the data (migrating from MySQL to PostgreSQL which supports the JSON datatype) to expand the ways I can extract info and I’ve sorted it by general contractor’s aggregate project value for this year.

This is a list of the 20 most active general contractors in Chicago for 2014 until May 13, 2014. I define “activity” purely by the companies’ involvement in a Chicago-based project and corresponds to that project’s estimated cost. (The data doesn’t specify a level of their involvement in a project.)

[table id=11 /]

Do any names ring a bell, or surprise you?

Using open data: Showing what projects licensed Chicago contractors are working on

March 17, 2014 / / 4 Comments
The New City developer recently received permits for over $50 million of construction work across from the Lincoln Park REI.

The New City developer recently received permits for nearly $50 million of construction work across from the Lincoln Park REI.

I wrote in my last post that I found “pain” in the process of finding a licensed contractor in the city (the pain of finding one who can install in the public way remains unmedicated).

I wanted to provide more than a list (and a map) and EveryBlock has already answered “What’s going on across the street from my house?”. I wanted to add value by helping people answer the question, “What contractor should I choose?”

Several other sites help you do this, like BuildZoom, Angie’s List, and the Better Business Bureau, by showing you customer reviews or complaints. I needed something different from mimicking a review site (a lot of the businesses are also on Yelp) so I decided to answer the question, “What projects have these companies done?”

That’s where the City of Chicago’s open data portal comes in: it has a dataset for Building Permits.

Check out 180 Properties, LLC from Skokie, Illinois. They’ve had two permits issued within the last three months. One project, at 3705 N Hoyne Avenue, is for interior renovation: “Remove/replace cabinets, countertops, flooring, patch & repair drywall”. The estimated cost for the project is $80,000. Sound like the kind of contractor you’re looking for? Call them up or keep researching.

You can even see who else is working on this project. Burnham Nationwide is listed as an expeditor on this project which means they’re likely acting as the intermediary between the Chicago Department of Buildings and the companies actually doing the work. Burnham will do site plans, drawings, occupancy, and ensure everything is in order. The property owner is also listed in the permit information.

For people who want to explore construction activity the other way around, finding projects before contractors, I created a “Permits explorer” page. This page searches the Building Permits dataset to show the most recently issued permits for the most expensive projects. Right now a project to alter and renovate Chicago Vocational High School at 2100 E 87th Street has an estimated cost of $40 million. I didn’t realize how much the Department of Buildings is funded by permits until I saw the permit fees.

The permit fee for the school renovation would have been $372,598 fee but the dataset said the entirety was waived (likely because it’s a Chicago Public School). Other projects I reviewed had permit fees between $30,000 and $75,000.

Real estate speculators, development watchers, and editors of Curbed Chicago should find browsing permits useful. The list includes two projects associated with the New City development at Halsted Street and Clybourn Avenue, across from the Lincoln Park REI store. The two permits are held by 1515 N Halsted, LLC. The first is for a “3 story steel framed mixed-use retail, restuarant, assembly (movie theater) building” at 1500 N Clybourn Avenue (for an estimated cost of $26,403,193), and the second permit describes a 7 story parking garage at 710 W Schiller Street (for $21,518,012).

How it works

I used my programming magic – I prefer PHP – to query the Socrata Open Data API (or SODA) to look for the given contractor’s name in one of eight name fields (there are 16 name fields) and then return information about the most recent permits. The Building Permits dataset gives the project location, work description, and its estimated cost. I figured you could use the project’s estimated cost to gauge the kind of work the contractor does – is the contractor more familiar with big jobs, or little jobs?

This method isn’t the best. Ideally there’d be a relational database where the “Contractor ID” in the licensed contractors dataset would match a “Contractor ID” field in the permit dataset. But the licensed contractors dataset doesn’t have a unique ID field, and isn’t even on the data portal.

Instead, I’m finding contractor-to-project matches by finding the first two or three words of the contractor’s name at the beginning of eight of the 16 name fields in the permit field. SODA works quickly on the query and it passes the results back to PHP in no time.

In the future I’d like to pull in scores and reviews from Yelp and other sites that have APIs (Angies List and Better Business Bureau don’t), as well as try to determine the name of the building – if it has one – by querying OpenStreetMap Nominatim.

Outta left field: I recreated the city’s contractor listing website

March 13, 2014 / / 2 Comments
The site looks good and works quickly on mobile devices.

LicensedChicagoContractors.com looks good and works quickly on mobile devices.

I’m working on a secret project to get something installed on the public way. The process to find out how to do it is as arduous as getting it done because you never finish learning the process. Every time you think you’ve figured something out, there’s something else.

To get the secret project installed I need a licensed contractor. Not only do a need a licensed contractor, but they must have the license to do work in the public way (versus doing work at your private property).

The Chicago Department of Buildings publishes a continually updated list of licensed contractors on its website but it’s annoying to use. There’s no search, no permanent links, and if you leave the window open long enough this weird session manager kicks in and stops you from browsing to the next page of results.

I asked my followers on Twitter the best way to scrape the data. The ever-amusing Dan O’Neill, who leads the Smart Chicago Collaborative (which hosts the Chicago Crash Browser), recommended just copying and pasting all 10 pages. That would work fine for the first time, but I might need to do it a second time when the data updates. Nick Bennett jumped in and used Selenium, a tool that automates web browsers. He said, “it’s inefficient but for a small job like that I figured why bother with something faster”.

I imported the data into a MySQL table and ran through some of my “standard” data cleaning methods (like trimming leading and trailing spaces, removing odd characters, and extracting good information into other columns, like phone numbers and ZIP codes).

With PHP – my favorite web language – I created a single page website that loads all 3,930 licensed general contractors extremely fast, loads the DataTables JavaScript library to enhance the table with search and sort. I used Bootstrap to make a responsive design meaning it adjusts to fit multiple screen sizes including smartphones and tablets.

I call it LicensedChicagoContractors.com.

The new website still doesn’t solve my problem of finding a company that can do work in the public way – I’m still working on this. The last online dataset I could find is on the city’s old http://egov.cityofchicago.org domain, and was cached by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine on January 25, 2010. Ideally this information – plumbers, public way, and general contractors – should be posted on the City’s data portal.

Chicago Crash Browser, miraculously, has 2012 bicycle and pedestrian crash data

January 4, 2014 / / 0 Comments

Screenshot shows that you can choose your own search radius. When researching, be sure to copy the permalink so you can revisit your results. 

I’ve upgraded the Chicago Crash Browser, my web application that gives you some basic crash and injury statitics for bicyclist and pedestrian crashes anywhere in Chicago, to include 2012 data. It took the Illinois Department of Transportation eight months to compile the data and it took me four months to finally get around to uploading it into my database. While I spent that time, I made some improvements to the usability of the app and output more information. Since the last major changes I made (back in February 2013) I’ve gained two code contributors (Richard and Robert) making this my first communal project on GitHub.

I know that it’s been used as part of research in the 46th Ward participatory budgeting process for 2013, and by residents in the 26th Ward to show Alderman Maldonado the problem intersections in the Humboldt Park area. Transitized recently included pedestrian crash stats obtained from the Crash Browser in a blog post about pedestrianizing Michigan Avenue in Streeterville.

The first change I made was adding another zoom level, number 19, so you can get closer to the data. I made some changes to count how many people were injured and total them. You can now choose your search distance in multiples of 50 feet between 50 and 200, inclusive. As is typical, I get sidetracked when I notice errors on the map. Thankfully I just fire up JOSM and correct them so the next person that looks at the map sees the correction. Future changes I want to make include upgrading to the latest jQuery, LeafletJS, and Leaflet plugins. I’d also like to migrate to Bootstrap to improve styling and add responsive design so it works better on small screens.

Sign up for the newsletter where I’ll send a couple emails each year describing new changes (I’ve so far only published one newsletter).

Getting a little closer to understanding Chicago’s pothole-filling performance status

December 21, 2013 /

Tom Kompare updated his web application that tracks the progress of potholes based on information in the city’s data portal in response to my query about how many potholes the city fills within 72 hours, which is the Chicago Department of Transportation’s performance measure.

He wrote to me via the Open Government Chicago group:

Without completely rewriting http://potholes.311services.org, I added a count of the number of open (not yet addressed) pothole repair tickets (requests) that exceed 3 days old. As of today, the data from the City of Chicago’s Data Portal shows 1,334 or the 1,404 open tickets in the 311 system are older than three days.

Full disclosure: The web app actually looks for greater than 4 days old. The Data Portal’s pothole data are only updated once a day, so these data are always a day old. 4 – 1 = 3.

Keep in mind that this web app only shows how many are yet to be addressed, and does not count how many have been patched within CDOT’s 3-day goal during some arbitrary time period. That is a much more intense calculation that this pure client-side Javascript web application can handle due to bandwidth restrictions on mobile (3/4G). This web app already pushes the mobile envelope with the amount of data downloaded. I can fix that, but, again, not without a rewrite.

Still, 1,334 open repair requests (12/16/2013 Data Portal data) is quite different than the number of open repair requests reported by CDOT (560 in Alley, 193 on street) on 12/16/2013. I’m not sure what is the difference.

This reminds me of a third issue with the way CDOT is presenting pothole performance data online (the first being that it’s PDF, the second that it doesn’t work in Safari). The six PDF files are overwritten for every new day of data. If you want information from two days ago, well you better have downloaded the PDF from two days ago!