Tag: Chicago Cityscape

Morgan CTA station is fueling new West Loop development

July 14, 2014 / / 1 Comment
First day of CTA Morgan Station serving the Green and Pink Lines

The Morgan Station was designed by Ross Barney Architects.

DNA Info Chicago discusses an informal study the Chicago Transit Authority conducted that showed, “since the [Morgan Green/Pink Line] station opened in May 2012, residential and business development in the surrounding neighborhood has continued at a faster pace than nearly all other markets within the city during the post-recession period.”

Morgan connects two major restaurant rows, one on Randolph Street that stretches much further east at Jefferson all the way west to Racine, and another on Fulton Market that starts at Carnavale (next to the Kennedy Expressway) and stretches to Morgan. Google’s huge new headquarters (under construction) and Coyne College – an HVAC institute – are within walking distance.

Using ridership information and commercial rents data, as well as information from the Chicago open data portal, CTA spokesperson Catherine Hosinski listed the following findings in the study:

  1. “A more than 20 percent increase in new business licenses.”
  2. “New construction and demolition permits spiked from one to 15. (The new construction/demolition permits issued after the opening of the station were compared to a 21-month period during the construction from August 2010 through May 2012)”
  3. “Average weekday ridership increased 30 percent between May 2013 and May 2014, according to information reflecting a 12-month rolling average over a 36-month period.”
  4. “Average weekend ridership increased more than 20 percent.”

Item #2 is data that we can see on Licensed Chicago Contractors. To help CTA planners and residents see this information more readily I’ve added all 145 CTA stations as places you can explore from the Places page.

How can you use this new place in connection with CTA’s study? With it you’ll be able to easily see building permits issued within half a mile from the CTA station and download this data for the last 9 years. You can also sort by projects’ estimated costs to find the biggest investments near the station.

Hosinski admits an important part of the study when she told DNA Info, “the West Loop was showing signs of becoming a booming neighborhood before the station was built…its presence has contributed to the migration of commuters and residents to the area.” Hosinski also said that you’ll find CTA stations at the heart of “most” Chicago neighborhoods and now CTA stations are part of the heart of tracking building permits.

Here’s how to track building permits (including demolitions and new construction) around any CTA station:

  1. Open the Places page on Chicago Cityscape
  2. Search for a station name (like Morgan), route name, or click “CTA Rail Station” in the right sidebar.
  3. Done! The list is sorted by the permit’s issue date, but click on any of the table headers to sort differently.
Morgan station on Licensed Chicago Contractors

We’re tracking over 1,700 building permits within a half mile of the Morgan station since July 2005.

Chicago wards with the most landmarked places

June 24, 2014 / / 0 Comments
Montgomery Ward Complex

People float by the Montgomery Ward Complex on Kayaks. Photo by Michelle Anderson.

Last week I met with the passionate staff at Landmarks Illinois to talk about Licensed Chicago Contractors. I wanted to understand the legality for historic preservation and determine ways to highlight landmarked structures on the website and track any modifications or demolitions to them.

I incorporated two new geographies over the weekend: Chicago landmark districts, and properties and areas on the National Register of Historic Places (both available on the City of Chicago open data portal).

I used pgShapeLoader to import them to my DigitalOcean-hosted PostgreSQL database and modified some existing code to start looking at these two new datasets. Voila, you can now track what’s going on in the Montgomery Ward Company Complex – currently occupied by “600 W” (at 600 W Chicago Avenue) hosting Groupon among other businesses and restaurants.

Today I was messing around with some queries after I saw that the ward containing this place on the National Register – the 27th – also had a bunch of other listed spots.

I wrote a query to see which wards have the most places on the National Register. The table below lists the top three wards, with links to their page on Licensed Chicago Contractors. You’ll find that many have no building permits associated with them. This is because of two reasons: the listing’s small geography to look within for permits may not include the geography of issued permits (they’re a few feet off); we don’t have a copy of all permits yet.

[table id=15 /]

4 wards don’t have any listings on the National Register of Historic Places and nine wards have one listing.

Building permits for new and changed things in 2014 is going up

May 28, 2014 / / 8 Comments

New City 19-story residential tower under construction near Lincoln Park.

The building permits data that powers Licensed Chicago Contractors has 11 permit types and I analyzed five of them to show the “new stuff” activity in Chicago this year through May 26, 2014. “New stuff” is the economic indicator to show that things are getting built. It includes the permits issued for new construction, renovation and alteration, porches, easy permit process (which can include things like kitchen renovation, or a new garage), and electric wiring where the estimated project cost is greater than $1.

You can see there was a small dip between January and February but since then has been climbing. See How’s Business? for more business-based metrics of the Chicago economy.

After publishing this chart I decided I’ll include signs because that is part of the “new stuff” activity I am trying to visualize. The other five permits are for scaffolding (a job indicator but not a “new stuff” indicator), elevator equipment (these aren’t always about new or replacement projects), wrecking and demolition (these permits usually don’t include estimated costs), and permits that represent extensions and reinstatements.

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?

Finding interesting data in the building permits dataset

March 26, 2014 / / 0 Comments

I had several great conversations with fellow #chihacknight visitors at the 1871 tech hub (222 W Merchandise Mart Plaza) about how to reveal more information about what’s being built in Chicago. I had introduced Licensed Chicago Contractors at the previous week’s hack night and tonight I showed site changes I made like how much faster it is now that I use DataTables’s server-side processing function.

Some of the discussions resulted in suggestions to try new tools and methods that would make processing the data more efficient, or more revealing. What are the ways I can aggregate the data, or connect to similar data from other sources?

One of the new features I announced I’ll be adding is statistics on building activity by neighborhood. I started testing some queries to see the results, and to find the query that outputs that information in a way that’ll pique users’ interests.

I calculated the aggregate estimated costs of all building permit activity for the past 90 days in select neighborhoods. All of the data was automatically generated using a simple MySQL query, but one that will get faster after switching to Postgres. (I eliminated any project whose estimated cost was less than $1,000 because there are many project types that are $0 to several hundred dollars.)

  • Logan Square: 77 projects, totaling $16,295,997.50 at a $211,636.33 average cost
  • West Loop: 30 projects, totaling $27,646,899.00 at a $921,563.30 average cost
  • Andersonville: 6 projects, totaling $358,770.00 at a $59,795.00 average cost
  • Bronzeville: 34 projects, totaling $17,050,662.00 at a $501,490.06 average cost
  • Hyde Park: 20 projects, totaling $13,492,265.00 at a $674,613.25 average cost
  • Humboldt Park: 35 projects, totaling $41,917,988.00 at a $1,197,656.80 average cost

How does Humboldt Park double the other neighborhoods’ average? I think it’s pretty simple: this $40 million Salvation Army residence that’s going to be built at 825 N Christiana Avenue.

The results for Bronzeville were higher than I expected because this is a distressed neighborhood that has lost of lot of population and has seen little development in the past several years. This isn’t to say the neighborhood is poor – I saw a report last fall that highlighted how the purchasing power of Bronzeville residents was quite high relative to neighboring communities.

Ronnie Harris showed me the report when I participated in the Center for Neighborhood Technology’s civic app competition and hackathon. We, along with Josh Engel, designed Build It! Bronzeville, although my participation was really pushing them to develop Josh’s game idea more and construct a paper version of it. Our team won the competition and Ronnie and Josh have kept working on it (I saw them at last week’s hack night).

Projects that pushed up Bronzeville’s average included several multi-family homes at around $1.4 million each on the blocks of 4700 and 4800 S Calumet Avenue.

Code discussion

I can’t test for the “Loop” right now in the way I have my data structured because a LIKE ‘%loop%’ query of the database will include “West Loop” records.

I need to change how the building permit data is stored – in my database – a little so that my site’s PHP codebase and MySQL queries can sift through the data faster. For example, I’m storing several key-value pairs as a JSON-encoded string in a TEXT field. One #chihacknight developer suggested I switch from MySQL to PostgreSQL because Postgres has native JSON-parsing functions.

I looked up how to use Postgres’s JSON functions and realized that, yes, I probably should do that, but that I also need to change the array structure of the data I’m encoding to JSON. In other words, with a tiny change now, I can be better prepared for the eventual migration to Postgres.