Chicago Building Code Scofflaw List with Owner and Geospatial Data

The Chicago Building Code Scofflaw List identifies priority buildings with serious and chronic code violations and their owners, as mandated by Section 2-92-416 of the Municipal Code of Chicago. Published by the City of Chicago on data.cityofchicago.org, the dataset includes building and owner list dates, addresses, defendant owner names, and associated geospatial coordinates and political boundaries. The list structure was updated on September 1, 2021, to align with the amended ordinance, which requires biannual publication.

Use Cases

• Cross-referencing defendant owner names with city contract bidder lists to enforce the ordinance's prohibition on awarding contracts.
• Mapping violation locations using LATITUDE, LONGITUDE, and ADDRESS columns to identify geographic clusters of code enforcement issues.
• Analyzing trends in building list dates and owner list dates to monitor the frequency of scofflaw designation and removal over time.
• Correlating violation records with demographic or economic data using WARD, COMMUNITY AREA, and Zip Codes 2 columns for neighborhood-level studies.
• Tracking legal proceedings via the CIRCUIT COURT CASE NUMBER column for monitoring ongoing enforcement actions against property owners.

Strengths

• Dataset structure is explicitly tied to a specific municipal ordinance (Section 2-92-416), ensuring a clear legal and operational purpose.
• Includes precise geospatial columns (LATITUDE, LONGITUDE, X_COORDINATE, Y_COORDINATE) and political boundaries (WARD, COMMUNITY AREA, ZIP Codes) for detailed location analysis.
• Published on multiple platforms (Socrata and Data.gov), indicating its importance for public transparency and cross-platform accessibility.

Limitations

• Critical metadata such as row count, dataset size, and license information are marked as unknown or 'None' across all provided sources.
• Sources show a conflict in the 'last updated' date, with one listing 2026-04-05 and another 2026-04-01, raising questions about update frequency and accuracy.
• The temporal coverage of the records (time_range) is not specified, making it impossible to determine the historical scope of the list.

Provenance

Source

City of Chicago, Department of Buildings (data.cityofchicago.org)

Collection Method

Collected and published pursuant to the Building Code Scofflaw Ordinance, with lists generated on September 1 and March 1 each year.

Freshness

2026-04-05 05:53:24.032824

Geography

City of Chicago, Illinois, USA