Affordable Rental Housing Developments
Vacant and Abandoned Buildings Reported Through Chicago 311
Individual Landmarks
The Five Datasets were provided by the City of Chicago’s Open Data Portal. They are Affordable Rental Housing Developments, 311 Service Requests - Vacant and Abandoned Buildings Reported - Historical, City-Owned Land Inventory, Individual Landmarks, and Building Violations.
The Affordable Rental Housing Developments dataset is of rental housing developments supported by the City of Chicago, last updated on October 17, 2018. The data is owned and created by the Department of Housing and Economic Development. Some of the more important fields in the dataset for this project are Community Area Name, Property Type, and Address. Source.
The 311 Service Requests - Vacant and Abandoned Buildings Reported - Historical dataset is of 311 requests reporting a vacant or abandoned building. The full dataset dates back to January 1, 2010 but for this project it was filtered to only include requests reported from January 1, 2017 to December 12, 2012. Source.
The City-Owned Land Inventory dataset is of property owned and managed by the City of Chicago. It is provided by the Chicago Department of Planning and Development. The dataset was filtered to only include the zoning classification RS-2, properties that had a lot area of 5,000 square feet, that had not yet been sold. Source.
The Individual Landmarks dataset is a list of Chicago landmarks designated as such by the Chicago City Council along with the Commission on Chicago Landmarks. The data set is provided by the Housing and Economic Development Department. Source.
The Building Violations dataset is of violations issued by the Chicago Buildings Department going back to 2006. The dataset is historical in nature and may not reflect up to date information. It was filtered to only include violations from January 1, 2017 to December 31, 2018. The dataset was filtered further to only include those violations of failed inspections of vacant buildings which had not yet been registered as vacant. Source.
In an article titled, “Second Chances for the Second City’s Vacant Properties: An Analysis of Chicago’s Policy Approaches to Vacany, Abandonment, & Blight,” author Elizabeth Butler writes about the problem of vacant and abandoned properties in Chicago. She writes that the damage to the city from vacant and abandoned properties in Chicago is akin to the damage wraught by the Great Chicago Fire, but to a much larger degree. Elizabeth Butler writes that “the vacancy problem burdens the entire region by perpetuating a cycle of povery, violence, and physical and social disorder.”
This is a list of stakeholders involved:
The maps, graphs, and datasets within this dashboard can provide insights into the vacancy problem in Chicago. The maps can provide insights into where vacant properties are located along with comparing them to other aspects of property in Chicago such as affordable rental housing locatons or city owned buildings. The two graphs give a comparison of building violations of vacant buildings to the 311 reported vacant and abandoned buildings. The datasets can provide detailed, searchable information on specific properties.
Source: Elizabeth Butler, “Second Chances for the Second City’s Vacant Properties: An Analysis of Chicago’s Policy Approaches to Vacancy, Abandonment, & Blight,” Chicago-Kent Law Review 91, no. 1 (2016): 233-266
These maps compare the 311 reported vacant and abandoned buildings with city owned buildings and affordable rental housing developments.
From these maps communities can be looked at closley to see the geospatial differences in the datasets.