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Fun with stats: Building permits by street name and number edition

September 17, 2017 / / 0 Comments
John Hancock Center

The John Hancock Center. Photo by Kevin Dickert.

 

On which street are the most building permits issued?

Michigan Avenue!

But where on Michigan Avenue are the most building permits issued?

Take a guess!

First, can you answer: Are most building permits issued to North Michigan Avenue (between Madison Street, 0 north/south, and Oak Street, 1000 north), or South Michigan Avenue (between Madison Street, 0 north/south, and um, somewhere south of 130th Street, 13000 south)?

Here’s the answer…

Even though South Michigan Avenue is at least 13x longer than North Michigan Avenue, South Michigan Avenue has 39 percent fewer building permits!

From 2006 to yesterday (Saturday), there were 7,828 building permits issued to projects on North Michigan Avenue and 4,714 building permits issued on South Michigan Avenue.

The most common address on North Michigan Avenue to receive building permits was 875 N Michigan Avenue. It’s also the most common address to receive building permits on all Chicago streets.

What’s there? The John Hancock Center (tower)!

The average building address number on North Michigan Avenue is 540.6. That means that building permits on North Michigan Avenue concentrate around Grand Avenue, which is near the city’s biggest Marriott hotel, and is where the Under Armor flagship store is.

The next most common street – after South Michigan Avenue – is North Clark Street, which extends from Madison Street (0 north/south) to the northern edge of the city at Howard Street, which is 7600 north, about 7.6 times longer than North Michigan Avenue.

S. Clark Street Signs

Businesses in the 400 block of South Clark Street, as of when the photo was taken in November 2008. I believe the hotel is still there. This is the busiest block of South Clark Street, for building permits. Photo by Bruce Laker.

South Clark Street doesn’t register in the top 10 or even the top 100. It comes it at number 162, with 772 building permits. This is surprising to me because South Clark Street runs from Madison Street (0 north/south) in downtown and goes to 2200 south, and has a lot of downtown office buildings.

South LaSalle Street (3,613 building permits), South Wabash Avenue (2,916), and South Dearborn (1,611) are all in the top 50. The data could be wrong somehow.

It’s impossible to track the many investment programs in disinvested Chicago neighborhoods

September 14, 2017 / / 0 Comments

An article in the Chicago Tribune that announces Chase bank’s increase in the amount of grants it is offering in Chicago goes on to detail myriad existing grant, loan, and donation programs from public and private sources for neighborhoods that have few jobs, few resources, no privilege, and lots of quality of life problems.

But not all of the programs. There are more, but I don’t even know how many more, nor do I know all of their names. I just know that I’ve read about them before.

The article is where I learned that Benefit Chicago – a $100 million investment fund  operated by the Chicago Community Trust, MacArthur Foundation, and Calvert Foundation, but hasn’t finished raising all the money – has started giving out loans and grants to Chicago recipients, including Garfield Produce Company.

Calvert Foundation has a brokerage (I think that’s the best name for it) through which regular Chicagoans can invest $20 minimum and earn 1.0% interest on that investment after 1 year. Longer periods net higher returns.

Anyway, back to my point…

If I were a business owner in Chicago, and I wanted financial assistance to expand my business – say, buy more kitchen equipment to be able to produce more food – where would I start looking?

Is there a list somewhere? Will my alder know? Is there a group in my neighborhood that can help me track down a funder? Is this more complicated than getting a VC to fund a “Bodega killer“?

One of the things I’ve tried to do with the tens of thousands of maps on Chicago Cityscape is highlight when a business or property owner could be eligible for financial assistance based purely on their geography.

Map of areas where you, as a business or property owner, can get funding assistance from publicly-funded programs.

These geographers where government funding is available are marked with a green icon of a dollar bill that links to a Resources page I adapted from a pamphlet the city’s planning department used to produce. These include:

  • TIF (tax increment financing) districts, including whether the district participates in the Small Business Improvement Fund
  • MMRP (micro market recovery program)
  • Enterprise Zone (a state of Illinois program)
  • Industrial Growth Zone (expedited approval processes + environmental remediation money)
  • Special Service Area (SSA; business improvement district)
  • Chicago landmark and National Register of Historic Places districts
  • Planned Manufacturing Districts (PMD), although I forget what assistance is available here
  • Neighborhood Opportunity Fund zones (an interesting policy that charges developers for additional density and grants that money to small business owners on the South and West Sides)

Not every area within the above categories is in a disinvested neighborhood because not every program was designed for that. 

Green dollar bill signs on Chicago Cityscape

Once you know this, I guess you can target your research. But there’s still a lot more to do. To start: Where the heck is Chase investing? Where the heck is Benefit Chicago investing? They don’t publish maps, as far as I can tell.

Actually, thinking about this more, as I reach nearly 400 words in this blog post, I’ve got another idea: Show up at Rahm’s new Small Business Center at City Hall and ask them.

Amazing view of downtown Chicago as an Amtrak train cuts through wide open land in the South Loop

August 31, 2017 / / 0 Comments

The bridge carries the St. Charles Air Line which itself carries freight and Amtrak traffic over the Chicago River at 16th Street. The City of New Orleans, Illini and Saluki routes use the line (after crossing the bridge, they back in to Union Station).

The park in the foreground is the extension of Ping Tom Park, and has a boathouse in which kayaks are stored.

The massive vacant parcel was once owned by Tony Rezko who was convicted of corruption and fraud.

The land is separated from that history, now, and will be developed by Related Midwest.

I can never remember the names that other people use for this land. I’ve always known it as the “Rezko lot”, so I’m sorry to perpetuate its relation to someone who was convicted of fraud and corruption.

Video was taken from my hot air balloon.

You won’t believe why Arcade Place in Chicago’s Loop was changed from an alley to a street

August 14, 2017 / / 4 Comments

The enhanced proposal for the building on the right, 230 W Monroe, was made possible by converting the alley to a “street”.

Arcade Place, for all intents and purposes, is an alley. It has Dumpsters, and loading docks. It has no sidewalks. It’s dark and probably dirty.

Yet in 1969, Alder Fred Roti passed an ordinance that gave the alley a name and street status.

Why? Because it gave an adjacent property owner the ability to get an FAR bonus and build a larger office building.

That’s not why Roti said he did it, though. “Nobody talked to me about this. I walk around the Loop all the time and I noticed this alley. It’s Arcade east and west and it didn’t make sense to me to be an alley here”, he told the Chicago Daily News.

How gracious he was to the poor alley!

There are several other “named alleys” in downtown Chicago, including Couch Place, Court Place, and Garland Court. I don’t know why they are streets.

I’m reading “Politics of Place: A History of Zoning in Chicago”, by Joseph P. Schwieterman, and Dana M. Caspall, which is full of downtown and North Side zoning change stories like the above. It’s available at the Chicago Public Library, or you can buy it right now.

A map of maps

August 3, 2017 / / 0 Comments

The map of maps.

Over on my website Chicago Cityscape I’ve assembled a map of maps: There are 20,432 maps in 36 layers. You might say there are 36 maps, and each of those maps has an arbitrary number of boundaries within. I say there are 20,000+ maps because there’s a unique webpage for each of them that can tell you even more information about that map.

This post is to throw out some analysis of these maps, in addition to the simple counts above.

The data comes from the City of Chicago, Cook County, and the U.S. Census Bureau. Some layers have come from bespoke sources, including the entrances of CTA and Metra stations drawn by Yonah Freemark and me for Transit Explorer. The sections of the Chicago River were divided and sliced by the Metropolitan Planning Council. The neighborhood and business organizations layers were drawn by me, by interpreting textual descriptions of the organizations’ boundaries, or by visually copying an organization’s own map.

There are 6,879 unique words longer than 2 characters, in the metadata of this map of maps. The most common word is “annexation”, which makes sense, given that the layer with the most maps shows the 10,668 Cook County annexation actions since 1830 – the first known plat was incorporated in the City of Chicago.

The GeoJSON file, an open source, human readable GIS format, comes out to 30 MB, and it make break your browser when you try to display this layer.

The next group of words are also generic, like “planned” and “development”, related to the Planned Development kind of zoning process in Chicago – called Planned Unit Development in other jurisdictions.

After that, some names of municipalities that traded back and forth between unincorporated Cook County and incorporated municipalities are on the list.

Working down the list, however, it gets really boring and I’m going to stop. I bet if you’re a smarter data science person you can find more interesting patterns in the words, but I’ve also increased the number of generic words (like planned development) by adding these as keywords to each map’s “full text search” index, to ensure that they would respond to a variety of search phrases from users.