This has been a top-requested feature for years: Show how many dwelling units were permitted in a given place in a given timeframe. 

Now, Chicago Cityscape shows that information, and here are three examples of how you can use it.

1. Count the number of new dwelling units permitted in a specific period of time

Say, new construction permits issued in November 2020 so far. The answer is shown below the permits table. Make sure you choose to show more than 10 permits at a time.

The answer? Approximately 501 units in 17 multi-unit buildings and 30 single-unit houses.

How to use it:

• Visit Building Permits Browser.
• click on the Filter permits button
• select the New construction checkbox
• click the Apply filters button
• scroll up to see the updated table and the updated summary in bold text immediately below the table

2. Compare residential permit activity in two Personal Places

(This example works in any of our 37,000+ predefined Places, but it's easy to draw a custom analysis area using the Personal Places tool.)

I drew two Personal Places: One covering part of the West Loop, and another covering part of River North. In just a couple of minutes, after adjusting the filters for the year 2020 and the "new construction" permit type, I can see the following data:

• West Loop Personal Place: 1,086 units in 7 multi-units (out of 38 total new construction permits)
• River North Personal Place: 396 units in 3 multi-unit (out of 22 total new construction permits)

3. Find the biggest residential building permitted in 2020. 

Open up the Building Permits Browser, choose the "New construction" filter, and then sort the table by the number of units (click on the column title to switch the ordering direction). 

You'll see the biggest new construction residential project this year is for Onni's 32-story high-rise next to K2.

Note that this feature is not 100% accurate. We weren't able to show it before because the City of Chicago data source doesn't publish that piece of information, even though it is collected on the permit application.

Instead, our software reads each building permit description and looks for keywords. There is no standard way to write out numbers or scope, so we did our best writing software that locates words like "3 d.u." and "single-family" or "SFH".