Category: Data

How to use Chicago Cityscape’s upgraded names search tool

December 7, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Search for names of people who do business in Chicago.

I created a combined dataset of over 2 million names, including contractors, architects, business names, and business owners and their shareholders, from Chicago’s open data portal, and property owners/managers from the property tax database. It’s one of three new features published in the last couple of weeks.

Type a person or company name in the search bar and press “search”. In less than 1 second you’ll get results and a hint as to what kind of records we have.

What should you search?

Take any news article about a Chicago kinda situation, like this recent Chicago Sun-Times article about the city using $8 million in taxpayer-provided TIF district money to move the Harriet Rees house one block. The move made way for a taxpayer-funded property acquisition on which the DePaul/McCormick Place stadium will be built.

The CST is making the point that something about the house’s sale and movement is sketchy (although I don’t know if they showed that anything illegal happened).

There’re a lot of names in the article, but here are some of the ones we can find info about in Chicago Cityscape.

Salvatore Martorina – an architect & building permit expeditor, although this name is connected to a lot of other names on the business licenses section of Cityscape

Oscar Tatosian – rug company owner, who owned the vacant lot to which the Rees house was moved

Bulley & Andrews – construction company which moved the house

There were no records for the one attorney and two law firms mentioned.

How to make a map of places of worship in Cook County using OpenStreetMap data

August 7, 2015 / / 1 Comment

The screenshot shows the configuration you need to find and download places of worship in Cook County, Illinois, using the Overpass Turbo website.

If you’re looking to make a map of churches, mosques, synagogues and other places of worship, you’ll need data.

  • The Yellow Pages won’t help because you can’t download that.
  • And Google Maps doesn’t let you have a slice of their database, either.
  • There’s no open data* for this because churches don’t pay taxes, don’t have business licenses, and aren’t required to register in any way

This where OpenStreetMap (OSM) comes in. It’s a virtual planet that anyone can edit and anyone can have for free.

First we need to figure out what tag people use to identify these places. Sometimes on OSM there are multiple tags that identify the same kind of place. You should prefer the one that’s either more accurate (and mentioned as such in the wiki) or widespread.

The OSM taginfo website says that editors have added over 1.2 million places of worship to the planet using amenity=place_of_worship.

Now that we know which tag to look for, we need an app that will help us get those places, but only within our desired boundary. Open up Overpass Turbo, which is a website that helps construct calls to the Overpass API, which is one way to find and download data from OSM.

Tutorial

In the default Overpass Turbo query, there’s probably a tag in brackets that says [amenity=drinking_fountain]. Change that to say [amenity=place_of_worship] (without the quotes). Now change the viewport of the map to show only the area in which you want Overpass Turbo to look for these places of worship. In the query this argument is listed as ({{bbox}}).

The map has a search bar to find boundaries (cities, counties, principalities, neighborhoods, etc.) so type in “Cook County” and press Enter. The Cook County in Illinois, United States of America, will probably appear first. Select that one and the map will zoom to show the whole county in the viewport.

Now that we’ve set the tag to [amenity=place_of_worship] and moved the map to show Cook County we can click “Run”. In a few seconds you’ll see a circle over each place of worship.

It’s now simple to download: Click on the “Export” button and click “KML” to be able to load the data into Google Earth, “GeoJSON” to load it into a GIS app like QGIS, or “save GeoJSON to gist” to create an instant map within GitHub.

*You could probably get creative and ask a municipality for a list of certificates of occupancy or building permits that had marked “religious assembly” as the zoning use for the property.

Two things I don’t like about TIF expenditures in Chicago

May 11, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Chicago Cityscape's TIF Projects map

I built a map of most Chicago TIF projects that you can filter on the fly. Type in any keyword, alderman’s name, or neighborhood and the map will re-center and zoom to the results.

1. Millions of dollars ($14.4 to be exact) has been or will be given to rich corporations, like Home Depot, to build massive stores with huge roofs and parking lots far away from where people live so everyone has to drive there. It’s highly unlikely they don’t mitigate stormwater runoff (except through temporary storage in a retention pond) or treat any of the water on site, contributing to local flooding and clogged pipes.

According to the project descriptions, property tax payers in these four TIF districts have partially subsidized the construction of over 1,903 car parking spaces and the associated ills of expansive asphalt areas and motorized traffic.

2. A massive subsidy was approved – $96 million – for McCaffery Interests’s Lakeside development on the former U.S. Steel South Works plant to build a mixed-use tower of 250 apartments in an area that has weak transit access and will take decades to fully fill out. We should instead be spending this kind of money building housing in already developed parts of the city (where there’s already amenities, or infrastructure for amenities – the Rezko land comes to mind).

What’s interesting about the Lakeside TIF project approval is that the containing TIF district, “Chicago Lakeside Development Phase 1”, has collected zero property tax revenue because there is no property in it!

Trolley on the future Lake Shore Drive

A tour bus drivers on the Lakeside development. Photo by Ann Fisher.

There are some projects I like, though. TIF has been used frequently to build affordable housing, housing for seniors, and housing for people who need assistance. 78 out of 380 projects mention the word “affordable”.

The City Hyde Park building, designed by Studio Gang Architects, will have 20% of its residential units designated as “affordable”, for families (of varying sizes) earning up to 60 percent of the area median income. The city standard is 10 percent but developers are also able to pay an “in lieu” fee so they don’t have to build the affordable units and instead can offer those units at market rates.

Other projects have a majority of affordable units.

Who are the top property owners in Cook County

April 1, 2015 / / 2 Comments
235 West Van Buren Street

There are several hundred condo units in the building at 235 W Van Buren Street, and each unit is associated with multiple Property Index Numbers (PIN). Photo by Jeff Zoline.

Several people have used Chicago Cityscape to try and find who owns a property. Since I’ve got property tax data for 2,013,563 individually billed pieces of property in Cook County I can help them research that answer.

The problem, though, is that the data, from the Cook County combined property tax  website, only shows who receives the property tax bills – the recipient – who isn’t always the property’s owner.

The combined website is a great tool. Property value info comes from the Assessor’s office. Sales data comes from the Recorder of Deeds, which is another, separately elected, Cook County government agency. Finally, the Treasurer’s office, a third agency, also with a separately elected leader, sends the bills and collects the tax.

The following is a list of the top 100 (or so) “property tax bill recipients” in Cook County for the tax years 2010 to 2014, ranked by the number of associated Property Index Numbers.

Many PINs have changed recipients after being sold or divided, and the data only lists the recipient at its final tax year. A tax bill for Unit 1401 at 235 W Van Buren St was at one time sent to “235 VAN BUREN, CORP” (along with 934 other bills), but in 2011 the PIN was divided after the condo unit was sold.

Of the 100 names, DataMade’s new “probablepeople” name parsing Python script identified 13 as persons. It mistakenly identified eight names as “Person”, leaving five people in the top 100.

The actual number is closer to 90, arrived at by combining 5 names that seem to be the same (using OpenRefine’s clustering function) and removing 5 “to the current taxpayer” and empty names. You’ll notice “Altus” listed four times (they’re based in Phoenix) and Chicago Title Land Trust, which can help property owners remain private, listed twice (associated with 643 PINs).

[table id=2 /]

Links between Emanuel’s campaign donors and their building projects

February 1, 2015 / / 1 Comment

The Tribune called out Emanuel’s appearance at a press conference as an endorsement of a locally-designed skyscraper (Studio Gang and bKL Architecture) to be built by Wanda, a Chinese development company – it has yet to receive any approval. Photo: Ted Cox, DNAinfo.

The Chicago Tribune reviewed the campaign contributions of Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s top donors and linked each donor to how it does business with Emanuel or the city. The article overall discussed how easy it is for Rahm to raise more money than what’s probably necessary to be elected a second time.

The Tribune graciously provided this data as a simple table which I’ve republished here in order to add links to building permit information from Chicago Cityscape. The website I’ve developed lists company and person names in an immediately searchable form. Currently there are over 90,000 companies, architects, and property owners that have received a building permit since 2010. Use the Illinois Sunshine database to find out who’s contributing to whom in the Chicago election.

Note: You’ll see “listed under [many] names” for several companies; this indicates that the Chicago building permit database uses different spellings, or the company has changed their name.

[table id=1 /]

Neither the article nor this table are meant to indicate any wrongdoing – campaign donations are public and it’s common to receive them from companies that do business in Chicago. It’s the extent that the donation appears to pay for favors or favoritism over other donors (which may be competing companies), or what’s right, that determines when immorality becomes an issue (a connection that’s hard to demonstrate).