Corrections are the main reason to write to this site, and they are genuinely welcome. If a page here contradicts a primary source, cites a code section that has been renumbered, describes a dataset field that has been redefined, or states a threshold that is no longer the threshold, telling us is the most useful thing a reader can do. It is better fixed than defended.
Where those questions should go instead. For the record at a particular address, the Department of Buildings and the City's own public data are the primary sources, and they are published for exactly this purpose. For what a condition at a building means, the right reader is a licensed professional who can get inside it. For what an open violation or a hearing disposition means for a transaction, an Illinois real estate attorney is the right reader, and the City itself directs transaction parties to the Department of Administrative Hearings rather than to its published violation data. For a complaint about a licensed professional, the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation publishes its own complaint procedure.
Email us at [email protected], or use the form below, which simply opens a pre-addressed message in your own email program. Nothing you type is transmitted to or stored by this website.
Sending a correction
Include the page address, the sentence you think is wrong, and where you can, the source that supports the correction — a section of the Municipal Code or the Construction Codes, a Department of Buildings page, a dataset field definition from the data portal, an Inspector General report paragraph. A correction with a citation attached can be checked in minutes and applied the same day. A correction without one has to be researched from scratch and sits in a queue behind the ones that can be verified.
Nobody is credited and nobody is blamed. The page simply changes, and its modified date advances because its content changed, which is the only thing that moves a date on this site.
Questions that can usefully be answered
Questions about the material itself are welcome, and the ones that can actually be acted on tend to look like this: a page that contradicts a document you are holding; a record described so compactly that it reads two ways; a threshold stated generally when the code draws a finer line; a kind of Chicago building record that has no page here; a passage that reads as advice when it was meant as explanation. All of those improve the site.
Correspondence from people who work with these records is especially useful. Architects and structural engineers who file, title and closing officers who read violation histories for a living, journalists who have requested the underlying data, and researchers who have hit the same gaps all see this material from inside. How a status field is actually used, which record a file turns out to be missing most often, what a dataset stops recording and when — that detail is the hardest material to source from published documents and the most valuable thing anyone sends.
Questions that will not be answered
Stated directly, so nobody spends an afternoon writing one. No opinion will be given on what the record at a particular address means, on whether to proceed with a purchase, on whether a violation is serious, or on what to do about a permit that was never closed out. No file, photograph, report, estimate or notice will be reviewed. No guidance will be given on obtaining, expediting or self-certifying a permit, on answering a citation, or on preparing for an administrative hearing. And no role will be taken in a dispute with a seller, a contractor, a neighbor, an architect or the City.
This is not modesty. Every one of those answers depends on documents this site has not seen and facts it cannot verify, and a confident reply built on a description typed into an email is worse than no reply, because it will be relied on.
Press, research and citation
Journalists, researchers and attorneys are welcome to quote this material with attribution and to link to any page. The machine-readable entity map published at the site root lists the site's key concepts with their source passages attached, which makes it straightforward to check what a page is asserting and where the assertion came from.
If you are working on a story or a matter and need a record described here in more depth, say so and the reply will point you at the underlying primary sources rather than at our own pages. Where a source was looked for and not found — and on this subject that happens with some of the most widely repeated claims about the self-certification program — the reply will say what was searched and what turned up, which is occasionally the more useful answer.
Suggesting a page
The 18 records covered here were chosen because each exists as a named object a reader can locate, but the list is not closed. If there is a kind of Chicago building record that has no page here, describe the shape of it: what it is called, which department creates it, under what duty, where it is published if it is published, and what a reader would wrongly conclude from it. Suggestions that arrive in that form are the ones that turn into pages.
Response times
This is a reference project, not a business, so replies are not immediate. Corrections with a source attached are prioritized, because they can be verified and applied quickly. General questions about the material are answered as time allows. Anything in the categories above will not get a substantive reply, since answering it would mean giving advice this site is not in a position to give. Nothing sent here is added to a mailing list, because there is no mailing list.