The City has a record of this building. What does it prove?
A Chicago permit history is a list of rows of roughly equal width, and the rows are not equivalent. One means City plan reviewers read the drawings. One means a private architect signed a statement and no City reviewer read anything. One means somebody paid a fee at a counter for work nobody evaluated. And almost none of them means an inspector ever came to look. This site takes the 18 kinds of record the City makes about a building and says, for each one, what it actually establishes.
The records a reader runs into first
Every profile answers the same four questions in the same order: what this record is, who created it and what they actually did, what it establishes about the building, and what it is routinely read as establishing but does not.
Approving work and looking at work are different acts
A permit is a decision taken before anything was built, on the basis of what the City was told. An inspection is a person standing in the building. The published data treats them as two unrelated systems, because they are — permit records carry no inspection outcome at all, and Chicago publishes no standalone buildings inspections dataset. Reading one as though it implied the other is the single most common mistake made with this material.
Records Made When Work Is Approved
The building permit and the routes to it — standard plan review, self-certification, Developer Services, the Easy Permit — plus zoning, porch and demolition approvals. Eight records that describe a transaction about a building, and none that describes the building.
Records Made When Someone Looked
Permit and final inspections, the certificate of occupancy, the recurring annual, elevator, boiler and life-safety regimes, and the enforcement end: violations, hearings and the scofflaw list. Ten records, and most of them exist only because the answer was no.
Every record, grouped by what it is evidence of
The order below is the argument: permission granted, somebody attended, something was found wrong. Weakest evidence first.
Permission was granted
8 recordsRecords created when the City allowed work to proceed, which is not the same as checking it.
Building permit Plan review Self-certification Easy Permit Developer Services Zoning Porch Demolition
Somebody attended
7 recordsRecords created because an inspector physically went to the building.
Certificate of occupancy Permit inspection Final inspection Annual inspection Elevator Boiler Life safety
A clean record and an unexamined building look identical
Because a passed inspection generally produces no public record in Chicago, a building inspected four times and cleared each time and a building nobody ever visited both show nothing. The instinct to read an empty record as reassuring gets the second case exactly backwards — and a long violation history often marks the only building anyone actually looked at.