Chicago Property Use and Occupancy Changes

Find City of Chicago building permits whose descriptions explicitly state a change from one use or occupancy to another. The report keeps the original description, permit ID and number, issue date, status, milestone, address, and an official City data link.

The City dataset includes residential and commercial permits. This tool does not classify them, infer a business opening, identify a tenant, predict an opening date, or say that work is complete. It uses fixed text rules and no LLM calls.

Input

Use an empty object for the latest seven UTC dates, or provide an inclusive range of up to 31 days:

{"startDate":"2026-08-08","endDate":"2026-09-07"}

Matching and source limits

It selects the bounded wording change (of|in) (use|occupancy) ... from ... (to|into) .... It rejects negated wording such as “no change in use” and deliberately excludes the contextual change of use & ... to ... construction. These limits make results reviewable but non-exhaustive.

Each run queries the official City of Chicago Building Permits dataset (ydr8-5enu) by issue_date, counts the rows independently, then downloads at most 5,000 rows. It verifies metadata before and after collection, the count, unique IDs, required identities, and date bounds. A source failure is an error; it is never returned as an empty report.

Output and caveats

One dataset item is emitted for each successful run. records contains each supported transition and its exact source quote. sourceStatus and sourceMilestone may be null because the source does not publish them for every permit type. openingDate is always null, and historicalTransitionObserved is always false. summaries has summaryVersion: "1" and deterministic exact-text plannedUseCounts, sourceStatusCounts, and locationCounts. A permit counts once per distinct planned-use label, so planned-use totals can exceed the permit count. A null status is missing or unavailable source data. Locations are not grouped into neighborhoods or geocoded.

The dataset is a current City publication and can change. A permit description is evidence of authorized work as described by the City, not proof of current occupancy, completion, a new business, or an opening date. City scope is Chicago only, not Cook County or the metropolitan area.

Source: City of Chicago Building Permits. This service is not affiliated with the City of Chicago.

Pricing and local verification

One successfully delivered nonempty report uses the report charge event ($1). Empty reports return one free report item. Runtime: Python 3.12 with Apify SDK 4.0.2.

python -m unittest -v

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