Chicago Cityscape updated its amenities database to add 1,000 more features across northeast Illinois and northwest Indiana. This database includes coffee shops, medical offices, grocery stores, banks, libraries, restaurants, and other essential places for urban living. Every Property Report and Place Report has been updated as of this writing, including those one-time purchases by non-members.

We use OpenStreetMap as our primary database for this data, which is open source and editable by anyone (although, similar to Wikipedia, only a few dedicated people maintain the database in this region). 

We invite our members to report or suggest new and closed businesses, places of worship, and other places (like parks and playgrounds) and Chicago Cityscape will make the necessary changes to the global database. Contributions others make, and that we make ourselves, are downloadable and usable by anyone. 

When a member uses Property Report to analyze a property on Chicago Cityscape, Amenities & Social infrastructure measures all of these features within a one-mile walking distance and tabulates them. This is useful for developers and brokers to better understand what's near a property. The data are even searchable; enter "grocery" and the map will show only the grocery stores within a one-mile walking distance.

Check out what's proximal to the Harold Washington Library Center in the screenshot and list below.

Community assets within a 1-mile walk of the Harold Washington Library Center

• 6 grocery stores
• 4 libraries
• 65 cafés & coffee shops
• 25 parks
• 189 restaurants
• 73 fast food places
• 21 banks
• 61 bars & pubs
• 0 community gardens
• 0 community centers
• 9 pharmacies
• 6 health & medical
• 10 schools
• 0 federally-qualified health centers (FQHC)

Chicago Cityscape has updated its schools map, shown within the Amenities & Social infrastructure sections of Place Reports and Property Reports, for the 2023-2024 school year. This year, there are 5,840 schools in the Illinois State Board of Education database of public, non-public, and other schools. This is compared to 5,625 schools for the 2022-2023 school year. 

The difference in numbers is due to our inclusion of regional programs this year (141 regional programs), 33 additional non-public special education schools, 7 additional non-public schools, 1 additional other school, 1 fewer state-authorized charter school, and 4 fewer public special education schools.

In Property Report for properties in Chicago, school locations are used in the Cannabis Compliance section, as city code requires that dispensaries are more than 500 feet away from school boundary lines.

Chicago Cityscape also has an exclusive statewide schools map (membership required), which can be filtered by municipality and school type.

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Thanks to a new dataset provided by the Cook County Assessor's Office, Chicago Cityscape now shows the owner names of tax-exempt properties. This includes properties owned by non-profit organizations, places of worship, and municipal and other government agencies. The dataset is integrated with Property Finder (part of the "Tax exempt status" filter) and each Property Report's Property & Ownership info section. 

The dataset, at the time of publication, includes information about 92,302 properties owned by 5,725 unique owners. The City of Chicago is attached to 19.2 percent of the properties; the Cook County Forest Preserve District is attached to 3.9 percent of the properties. Other top owners include Cook County, the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA), the Catholic Bishop of Chicago, the Chicago Board of Education, the Illinois Department of Transportation (IDOT), and the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA).

The tax-exempt property owner name will appear in a new column in any data export from Property Finder.

Additionally, it's possible to filter for properties owned by a specific tax-exempt owner. In Property Finder, look for the "Tax exempt status & owner" filters and enter a one-word name in the search field and select from the results. Then select the "Apply filters" button.

Many of the owner names are misspelled or abbreviated in unexpected ways, an issue in the source dataset. We have implemented a solution that repairs and improves the names of the most prolific owners making it possible to, for example, search for "CHA" to find the Chicago Housing Authority. (View the complete list of names in the dataset.)

Chicago Cityscape has added two new incentives to Incentives Checker. 

- Opportunity Areas in suburban Cook County. These areas provide residents with more amenities, jobs, and other resources. The Housing Authority of Cook County designates these and provides a stipend for moving costs if a renter with a voucher can find a new apartment in one of these areas. Every Property Report and Place Report lookup in suburban Cook County will check for HACC's Community Choice Program. 

- Justice 40 area across Illinois. The Biden administration's Justice 40 initiative prioritizes certain areas for RAISE grants, which comprises Historically Disadvantaged Community (HDC) and Areas of Persistent Poverty (AOPP). 

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A member requested that they would like a filter in Property Finder to locate corner lots. After a short feasibility investigation we found that it would be possible by locating parcels that are within 40 feet of two differently-named streets. 

The "At an intersection or corner lot" filter can be combined with all other filters. We recommend adding – at least for searches in Chicago – a zoning district filter as well as a filter to exclude condos (this will also speed up the search). (If you don't exclude condos then there will be 100s of results in Property Finder that don't represent developable lots.)

How to use the corner lot filter

• Open a Place Report in Cook County (Chicago community area, ZIP code, etc.)
• In the Property Finder filters, look for the "Additional filters" heading and select the "reveal additional filters" link to expand this section and show the additional filters.
• Combine this with another filter. We recommend excluding condo (2-99), EX, and RR, properties in the "Exclude this property class" filter.
• Select the "Apply filters" button. A moment later the data table and the map will refresh with the results. 

In the Near West Side community area of Chicago there are 202 corner properties that are zoned to allow multi-family housing.

Chicago Cityscape has added the latest quarter of property sales in Cook County. There were 30,291 sales recorded between April 1, 2023, and June 30, 2023. That is a 21.1 percent increase in sales compared to 2023 Q1.

Read about the change from 2022 Q4 to 2022 Q1.

Our full dataset of Cook County property sales spans the period of 2014 to the second quarter of 2023; data comes from the Illinois Department of Revenue and is updated quarterly, within two weeks of the end of the quarter.

Forty-seven percent of these sales and transactions were for Chicago properties. Use the Property Sales Browser to analyze the number and value of sales in other municipalities.

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