Category: Data

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.

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.