We put the federal mortgage record next to Cook County's deed record for 2025. In West Englewood, 100 homes sold at or under $100,000 and four small purchase mortgages were written. What that gap does and doesn't tell you.
The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act became law on July 11 without the president's signature. We checked its four Chicago-relevant sections against 241,653 deeds, the city's permit file, and its inspection record. The famous investor cap has the least to grip here.
Forty-four buildings are on the city's published scofflaw list. Four have been on every list for four and a half years, the oldest case was filed in 2016, and fourteen of them sit in a single community area. The record, read as the court docket it is.
Chicago recorded 106,593 building-code violations in 2018 and 49,377 in 2025 — with almost exactly the same inspector budget. The city's code enforcement quietly halved after 2020 and never came back, complaint response hardest of all, in nearly every neighborhood.
Traffic signals get fixed in three hours; a garbage cart takes fifteen days; and the pothole map has a geography all its own. We put a stopwatch on two and a half years of Chicago's 311 files, for all eight everyday services, in all 77 community areas.
Condo-tower deconversions, scattered-site operators, a nonprofit receiver, and 9,704 two-year flips concentrated in the bungalow belt: what the buyer names on nine years of recorded Chicago sales actually show.
The Assessor's rolls show 7,914 small apartment buildings leaving Chicago's two-to-six-flat stock since 2006, about one a day, while prices rose 62 percent and more than one buyer in four became a corporate entity. The city's housing ladder, measured.
We scored five measurable market signals — price acceleration, flats repricing, corporate buying, permits, and new businesses — in every Chicago community area. The active cluster is not where the conversation says it is.
We joined every market sale recorded by the Cook County Assessor since 2018 to Chicago's 77 community areas. What buyers actually paid, by neighborhood and by type of home, with a map you can scrub through seven years.
Scroll the Red Line from Howard to 95th: a station-by-station ride through 25 years of CTA turnstile data, with a train that moves down the map as you read.
