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.
Chicago has been named America's rattiest city ten years running - by a pest-control company counting its own treatments. The city's actual 311 rat ledger, all 372,251 complaints of it, tells a richer story: a 2021 peak, four straight years of decline, a July rat season peaking now, and a rat map crowned by Lake View. With an interactive report card for all 77 neighborhoods.
Our three computed datasets - construction permits, new business licenses, and L station recovery - painted onto one interactive map of the 77 community areas. Tap between the views and watch the same city rearrange itself.
The city licensed 6,503 new business locations in 2025 - about 13 percent below 2019, with the Loop down 38 percent, the worst of the ten biggest license centers. The third leg of our vitality triangle, computed from the city's own license records - including the neighborhood 'boom' that turned out to be a flea market's vendor stalls.
3.8 billion turnstile entries since 2001 tell the L's whole modern arc: a fifteen-year climb to the 2015 peak, a slide that started before the pandemic, the 2020 cliff, and five straight years of recovery. Plus the 25-year station reshuffle and the rise of the weekend rider - three charts, all computed from the city's own data.
Speed-camera violations are up 38 percent in 2026 - but at cameras that existed last year, they actually fell 16 percent. The whole increase is the new fleet. We ranked all 213 speed cameras and 151 red-light intersections from the city's own data.
