Chicago and Seattle Building Permit Activity Brief

Prioritize follow-up research on recently issued construction permits using two official city data portals. Rows are issued activity signals, not open bids, contracts, or verified spending. The default scans both cities for seven complete calendar days in each city's local time zone, ending before today there, and source-reported project costs of at least $50,000.

Input

Choose Chicago and/or Seattle, 1–30 complete city-local calendar days (default 7), a minimum source project cost (default $50,000), and a row cap (default 500).

Output and coverage

One row per unique city and permit ID. Rows contain the source-local issue date, general work category, source permit type/status, reported or estimated cost with its basis, general area and an official record link. No names, contacts, street addresses, coordinates or raw work descriptions are exported. OUTPUT reports each city's local date interval, source counts, delivered rows and coverageComplete. A cap yields explicit partial coverage. Genuine zero matches are reported with scoped source counts; source failures fail the run. City source data may be corrected after a run. Chicago and Seattle costs are not equivalent actual spending.

Limits

At most two source datasets, ten total requests, 180 seconds, 256 MB, and two-second source pacing. A cap is explicitly partial, and 403/429/timeouts/schema errors fail.

Privacy

Only project-level, general-area permit facts are exported. Source owner/contractor/contact data, addresses, coordinates and descriptions are never retained or included.

Source and rights

Sources: City of Chicago Building Permits (ydr8-5enu) and City of Seattle Building Permits (76t5-zqzr) public Socrata JSON endpoints. Seattle marks this dataset Public Domain. Chicago's Data Terms of Use, USE OF DATA state: “Any user of this website providing any software application, or other secondary or derivative application using data supplied at this website shall do the following: Include the following disclaimer at the site where the software application, or other secondary or derivative application can be accessed or downloaded:”. The required disclaimer is:

This site provides applications using data that has been modified for use from its original source, www.cityofchicago.org, the official website of the City of Chicago. The City of Chicago makes no claims as to the content, accuracy, timeliness, or completeness of any of the data provided at this site. The data provided at this site is subject to change at any time. It is understood that the data provided at this site is being used at one’s own risk.

Verify current robots and pace at least two seconds. No proxy, paid API, login, or raw-source retention.

Pricing

One permit-row-exported primary event at $0.0015 per unique validated row delivered. No custom start or secondary event; coverage metadata and failed rows are uncharged. Platform memory start fees, if any, must be disclosed in Store copy.