Photo: Evelyn Ryan
The Chicago media regularly publishes stories highlighting new place-based investments, major housing developments, and other community initiatives. These types of stories are important to help the public understand what is happening in neighborhoods across Chicago and how residents across the city are responding to changes in their communities.
The activities being reported on in these articles are typically part of a broader story of neighborhood change. To help contextualize these stories within a broader context of current and changing neighborhood housing market, demographic, and economic conditions, IHS developed an interactive map tool combining our Mapping Displacement Pressure typologies with local stories happening on the ground across the city. This tool has been maintained by IHS since 2019, and this newest release includes stories published in 2023 and will be continually updated throughout 2024.
These updated stories describe the efforts to create transit-oriented developments, strategies to repurpose and redevelop vacant land, recent investments in affordable housing, the push for migrant shelters, and many other topics. On the map, you’ll find stories that:
- Explore the development of creative, transit-oriented, and affordable housing to support equitable community investment.
- Outline projects focused on preserving and commemorating historic housing.
- Describe the ways schools, community gardens, and other public spaces are being repurposed to support homeless and migrant populations.
- Report on community engagement, input, and activism related to new developments.
Explore the map tool below by clicking on each point to display the related media story and access the link to the original story. Users can click each census tract to display housing market typology information, including price tiers and changes. The mapping tool is updated regularly as new media stories appear. Click here for a full-page version of the map below. Note: To view certain media stories, you'll be required to open them in a new tab or window.
About the Mapping Tool
The ways that neighborhoods change can vary based on numerous factors associated a community’s demographic, economic, and housing market contexts. All communities have their own unique dynamics, histories, and subsequent challenges. In some areas, neighborhoods have experienced disinvestment, a deteriorating housing stock, and population decline, and communities are working to reverse those trends and attract new investment. Other areas have seen lost affordability from increasing rental demand and a rise in development activity, and community residents are struggling with displacement pressures, changes to long-term businesses, and the implications of a flood of outside investment.
Pairing real time news stories with our data on affordability pressures and displacement risk can provide spatial, housing market, and demographic context and help readers assess the potential implications of the activities described in each article. These new stories also have the ability to provide on the ground narratives, local resident perspectives, and information on how changes transpire across city blocks.
Chicago is fortunate to have a rich media landscape and many outlets that invest in the coverage of neighborhood news. We want to thank all of these publications and journalists for their work, but particularly Block Club Chicago whose reporting is extensively featured on the map. To read more about the Mapping Stories of Neighborhood Change tool, click here.
