New: Zoning maps for six municipalities

This is our biggest expansion into the suburbs

Adding information for suburban communities has been a constant request in our four year existence (happy birthday us this month). Many of the developers who use Chicago Cityscape are active in municipalities outside of Chicago. While Chicago is where most development occurs in the region, there is plenty of building going on in the suburbs.

Buildings in Oak Park, Evanston, and Naperville, all municipalities where Chicago Cityscape can tell you the current zoning information. All by Eric Allix Rogers.

We thrive on requests from our users, and heard “Do you have data and maps for Evanston?” the most. As of this writing we have the zoning maps for six additional municipalities:

1. Evanston (we also have building permits and Ward maps)
2. Naperville (we also have building permits)
3. Oak Park
4. Northbrook
5. Maywood
6. Aurora

Anytime you look up an address in one of those places we’ll give you the current zoning code. Where available, we’ll show you the zoning description (the individual municipalities provide these descriptions).

The main map on your Address Snapshot lookup will also have a zoning map for properties in those municipalities (read more about this below).

Evanston TOD status

In the same site change, we’ve added a check for Transit-Oriented Development status in Evanston. The city adopted “TOD areas”, which are fixed groups of parcels near the several Metra and CTA stations in Evanston.

The TOD status check for Evanston works just like the one we’ve offered for Chicago address lookups for years. A simple check mark indicates this building is in a TOD area, and the requirements and incentives for housing developments are summarized.

Look up any address in Evanston and we’ll tell you if it is in the TOD area, and give you a summary of the development incentives there.

The TOD areas are part of Evanston’s “Inclusionary Housing Ordinance” (IHO), adopted in late 2015, that works similarly to Chicago’s Affordable Requirements Ordinance (ARO). It has a lower trigger threshold: In Evanston’s TOD areas, any development with 5 or more units, with or without a zoning change, must comply. Chicago’s ARO is most frequently triggered by the property owner getting a zoning change; it only applies to developments with 10 or more units.

Zoning map style update

We’ve also updated how the zoning map looks by adding two new categories:

• Single-family only (although every zoning code has some exceptions to allow schools and other institutional uses)
• Commercial only (in Chicago, every B and C district allows housing, and it’s M districts that are commercial only; in other municipalities there are distinct “O” and “C” districts for office and commercial, only)

A restyled zoning map shows single-family areas in a brighter shade of green than residential areas that also allow multi-family; there’s also a new, light-orange area to show commercial-only (no residential) areas. This zoning map style is the same for all of the municipalities we cover.