Before a building in Chicago comes down — or asbestos comes out — the city requires a notice of intent. 1,253 of them carry proposed 2026 start dates so far: 815 asbestos-abatement notifications, 421 demolition notices, and 17 filed as both. A notice is paperwork about intended work, never a completed demolition — and the paperwork is heaviest on the Near North Side, in Lake View, and in the Loop, driven by asbestos-abatement filings, while the demolition subset clusters in a different belt and the complaint file points somewhere else again.
CDPH notification and complaint files, Chicago data portal · retrieved August 8, 2026 · notices with 2026 proposed starts, as filed through August 6Reading a notice correctly
Chicago requires advance notice to the Department of Public Health (CDPH) before demolition or asbestos-abatement work — the notification file describes its records as Notices of Intent filed “per Chapter 11-4 Article XVIII of the Municipal Code” — and the notification file records each notice with the site address and a proposed start date. Everything here is intent: a notice is not a permit, not a completed demolition, and not a measurement of dust. It is also a different instrument from the wrecking permits our demolition-and-rebuild analysis counts, and from the housing stock our two-flat analysis tracks — the three files answer different questions about the same city. This page uses the file’s modern, CDPH-era notice types. Its legacy rows from the disbanded Department of Environment carry anomalous date values — proposed starts recorded in years like 0004 and 9968 sit at those labels’ extremes — so they are excluded.
Two notice maps in one file
- Near North Side1068%
- Lake View1008%
- Loop927%
- Lincoln Park736%
- West Town675%
- West Town49
- Lake View44
- Lincoln Park36
- North Center28
- Logan Square22
Split the file by type and two geographies appear. Asbestos notifications — about two-thirds of 2026 filings — concentrate downtown and on the North lakefront: the Near North Side, Lake View, and the Loop lead the combined map. The demolition subset runs a different belt: West Town, Lake View, Lincoln Park, North Center, and Logan Square lead it — a North and Northwest Side belt familiar from our permit-based analysis, which found rebuild permits following more than 80 percent of 2018–2022 demolitions in its leading areas there — with Roseland and West Pullman the largest South Side counts.
The complaint file points somewhere else
- Belmont Cragin327
- West Town181
- Logan Square125
- Lincoln Park124
- Lake View79
CDPH’s complaint file logs construction-and-demolition and asbestos complaints, and its geography matches neither notice map: Belmont Cragin recorded 327 such complaints dated 2023–2025 — nearly double the next area, West Town at 181 — while sitting high on neither notice list. The files cannot tie any complaint to any notice, and they do not say why more complaints are recorded at sites in one area. Two boundaries on this file, both disclosed: it publishes resolved cases (every row from 2018 onward carries a resolution date, recorded a median of one day after the complaint date), and this page counts records by complaint date and analyzes no timing — and its recorded volume is sharply uneven across years (five rows of these types dated 2019, 836 dated 2025), for reasons the records do not state, so this page draws no trend from the series.
Known limits
Counts are notices, not sites: one address can file several notices, and a proposed start date can move or never happen. The community-area geography resolves the portal’s internal region codes against the city’s boundary file — the method note explains the mapping — and every 2026 notice resolved to an area. Nothing in either file measures dust, air quality, or exposure; this page maps paperwork, and says so.
- Sources CDPH Environmental Asbestos and Demolition Notification (qhb4-qx8k, rows updated August 6, 2026) and CDPH Environmental Complaints (fypr-ksnz), retrieved August 8, 2026.
- Counting Notices: modern CDPH-era types (Demolition Notice of Intent, Asbestos Notification, Both) grouped by proposed-start year and by community area; 2026 = proposed starts January 1–December 31, 2026, as filed through August 6. Complaints: the Construction and Demolition and Asbestos Work Order types, counted by the file’s complaint-date field everywhere on this page; the geography table covers complaint dates in the complete calendar years 2023–2025, and 2,013 rows carrying no complaint date sit outside all year counts.
- Geography The portal’s computed community-area column stores internal region codes, not area numbers. The code-to-area crosswalk was derived from the city’s 311 file (v6vf-nfxy), which carries both columns: each of the 77 codes was assigned the community area that over 95 percent of that code’s 2026 311 rows name — the sub-5-percent disagreement exists only among those 311 validation rows, and no notice or complaint record was excluded by the crosswalk. Area names come from the city’s boundary dataset (igwz-8jzy), and every 2026 notice carried a code.
Computed by KCM Desk from records retrieved August 8, 2026. If you spot an error, corrections come first.