Cityscape’s Top 12 stories in 2021
Like 2020, 🏘 accessory dwelling units was a dominant story for Chicago Cityscape, but we talked about other trends as well. Last year I wrote, “I’m looking forward to seeing what backyard house designs are built…”
Last year I wrote, “I’m looking forward to seeing what backyard house designs are built…” Unfortunately, no backyard houses were completed but six were permitted and 22 ADUs have been permitted overall.
January 2021
Chicago Cityscape enhanced every relevant feature to identify ADU opportunities for service providers. It’s easy to look up any address to see if ADUs are eligible at that location, and it’s possible to identify every eligible property in an area.
There were no blog posts in February.
March
We featured Carmin’s future backyard house, which was the first commissioned project that a client or architect shared with us.
Building permits tell a lot of stories, including how there’s been an increase in multi-family buildings constructed out of wood, that weren't allowed prior to the adoption of the 2019 Chicago Building Code.
April
Every year, Cook County publishes a very high-resolution aerial photography dataset, and Cityscape users can look at it right inside any Address Snapshot. Since publishing that tutorial we added the 2020 aerial imagery.
May
The City of Chicago began accepting applications for ADU building permits and at the time we published 110 property owners had expressed intent to build a basement unit or backyard house.
June
Chicago Cityscape announced that it received a grant to create the “Data Equity Cohort”, a group of real estate professionals and industry-adjacent organization leaders to help us understand what kind of data they need to improve their development efforts and how we could best provide it to them.
July
The first three permits for buildings at the Obama Presidential Center were issued (the Forum, parking garage, and Chicago Public Library branch). Land clearing work had begun months earlier.
August
We broke down the newly released demographic data from the 2020 Census, showing a significant decline in Chicago’s black population but a significant increase in population in the south Lakefront community areas.
September
Chicago Cityscape created the only — still true today — map of the new Affordable Requirements Ordinance areas that took effect the following month. These maps are essential for developers and zoning attorneys.
October
We wrote a blog post to celebrate the six ADU permits that had been issued, and talked about the additional “applications of intent” that more property owners had filed since writing about those in May.
November
In collaboration with MAP Strategies, we looked at the new construction hotspots across Chicago, highlighting Portage Park and Jefferson Park, as well as a particularly active street in Bronzeville.
December
Reaching 21 ADU permits this year was a milestone. While neither Cityscape nor the City of Chicago had a goal for the number of ADU permits issued in the first seven months of re-legalization, I secretly wanted at least 20 by the end of the year.
