New City, By The Numbers | Keep Chicagoland Moving

New City — the community area on Chicago’s South Side that holds Back of the Yards and Canaryville — is one of only two of the city’s 77 community areas where four of the five market indicators in our gentrification-signals analysis are flashing at once. East Garfield Park is the other, and the two do not trip the same four: there, corporate buying was the signal that stayed quiet; here it is the one that fired, while building permits stayed quiet instead. This page gathers what our analyses have measured about the area — homes, lending, licenses, city services, subsidized housing — each figure linked to the analysis that computed it. What the numbers mean for the people living there is not a question data can settle, and this page does not try.

Assembled from our earlier analyses’ source files, plus one fresh license query · August 2, 2026

The record, on one page Each figure is computed from these analyses’ source files and explained — methods, windows, caveats — in the analyses linked in the sections below. Where a count is small, the text says so.

What homes sell for

This is a market of houses and two-to-six-flats — condo sales here are rare enough that our screen records only one or two a year, too few to price. The house median went from $115,500 in 2019 (107 sales) to $210,000 in 2025 (84 sales) — 82 percent higher, starting from a base at half the citywide 2019 median of $230,000. The two-to-six-flat median went from $115,000 to $237,000 over the same years — slightly more than doubling, on 100 sales in 2025. Both medians remain far below the citywide 2025 house median of $320,000.

The screens behind these medians are documented here — only arm’s-length deeds, meaning ordinary sales between unrelated parties, mapped to community areas: What a Chicago Home Actually Sold For: 241,653 Deeds, All 77 Community Areas, 2018–2026

Which signals are flashing — and which one is not

Our five-indicator screen looks for house prices accelerating from a below-citywide base, two-to-six-flat prices repricing faster than the city, corporate buyers taking a bigger share, permits multiplying, and new business licenses multiplying. New City trips the first three and the last. The corporate share of home purchases moved from 11 to 16.2 percent between the screen’s pooled windows — a rise of 5.2 percentage points, clearing the five-point threshold the screen requires, which East Garfield Park’s did not. The quiet one here is permits: 44 across the screen’s 2018–19 window against 59 across 2024–25, short of the screen’s bar — and in the half-year counts, 30 new-construction permits in the first half of 2025 against 12 in the first half of 2026. A signal is a measurement of change in a window, not a verdict on a neighborhood.

The full method is here, with every area scored: Where Chicago’s Gentrification Signals Are Flashing: Five Market Indicators, All 77 Community Areas

The fastest license growth on our screen

New business licenses went from 80 in 2019 to 214 in 2025 — the fastest growth of any community area that clears the licensing analysis’s volume floor, and it is not close: New City’s count grew 168 percent, while the next-fastest area, East Garfield Park, grew 25 percent. The composition matters as much as the count. The general-purpose Limited Business License went from 27 to 126 — the bulk of the rise — and Pop-Up Retail licenses, a category with just one issuance here in 2019, added 27 in 2025. New restaurant licenses grew modestly by comparison. The records count licenses issued, not doors that opened or stayed open; we report the composition so the 168 percent rise reads as what it is. On the storefront side, of the 29 addresses where an inspector found a restaurant gone since 2019, 66 percent saw a new food business within two years — above the citywide 56 percent, though on a base small enough that the linked analysis’s statistical check does not treat the difference as more than chance.

The citywide count fell by a thousand new licenses a year while this area’s rose; the decline is measured here: Chicago Licenses 1,000 Fewer New Businesses a Year Than Before the Pandemic. The Gap Is Downtown.

The refill screen and every area’s rate are measured here: After a Chicago Restaurant Is Found Out of Business, a New Food Business Shows Up in Inspection Records at 56 Percent of Addresses Within Two Years

Where the small-mortgage gap lives

Federal mortgage records show 170 home-purchase loans in the area in 2025 against 185 sales in our deed screen — two systems counting different things, not a matched pair. The starkest line is at the bottom of the market: 31 of the area’s recorded sales closed under $100,000, and lenders wrote 2 purchase loans that size — the pattern our citywide small-mortgage analysis measured, plainly visible here. The records cannot say how those sales were financed — only that a home-purchase mortgage that size almost never appears in them.

The lending records and their limits are set out here: 1,424 Chicago Homes Sold for Under $100,000 Last Year. Lenders Wrote 289 Mortgages That Size.

City services, on the clock

From our timing of 793,774 closed 311 requests — created January 2024 through June 2026 — graffiti requests in New City closed in 0.8 days at the median across 5,100 requests, against 0.7 citywide. Pothole requests took 4.5 days against 5.1 citywide; abandoned-vehicle requests 8.1 days against 11.6; rodent requests 4.0 against 3.6. A closed request is the record’s word, not a verified repair.

Every request type and every area are timed here, with the method: Chicago on the Clock: We Timed 793,774 Service Requests, Neighborhood by Neighborhood

The subsidized stock, and the stop that isn’t there

The city’s affordable-rental inventory lists 4 developments and 336 units in New City — a fraction of the 1,205 units listed in East Garfield Park, the other four-signal area. The inventory is a courtesy list, last updated December 30, 2024, and partial by its own description. And where East Garfield Park has its Conservatory stop, New City has none: in our station-to-community-area mapping, no L station falls inside the area’s boundaries — its transit is the bus grid and the stations of neighboring areas.

Our count of that inventory covers its boundaries and the state law that takes rent control off the table in Chicago: New York City’s Rent Board Set 2026-27 Stabilized Increases at Zero. Illinois Law Bars Chicago From Controlling Private Rents.

How this profile works

With one exception, every figure on this page is read from the source files of the analyses linked above, each of which documents its own methods, windows and caveats. The one fresh query is the license-type breakdown, pulled August 2, 2026 from the city’s business-license records (the same Data Portal dataset the licensing analysis uses) with that analysis’s exact counting rule. Small bases are flagged where they occur. And the standing rule for neighborhood pages: we report what the records show and take no position on where anyone should live — the records cannot answer that, and we do not pretend they can. If you spot an error, corrections come first.