Overview
Most published guides to Chicago building records are sorted by the name of the document. This one is sorted by what created it, because the origin of a record predicts its weight far better than its title does. Two records with similar names — a permit inspection and an annual inspection certificate — are produced by different duties running on different clocks, and knowing which is which tells a reader more than any amount of detail about the form itself.
Why origin rather than subject
Sorting by subject produces a list that reads well and answers nothing. Grouped by subject, a self-certified permit sits beside a City plan review because both concern drawings, and the one fact that separates them — that no City reviewer read one of them — disappears into the category. Grouped by origin, they stay apart, because one was approved after a municipal examination and the other was approved on a private attestation. The grouping does the work the names refuse to do.
There is also a sequencing argument, and it is the reason the three groupings below run in the order they do. Permission granted, somebody attended, something was found wrong: that is ascending order of what the record actually establishes about the physical building. A reader who starts at the top is reading the weakest evidence first, which is the right way round, because the weak evidence is the kind that is abundant and the strong evidence is the kind that is usually missing.
The weight is not obvious from the name
Two records that sound like variations on each other sit in different groupings here. A porch permit is an approval; the inspection that goes with it is not, and only the second one establishes that the structure was built as drawn. A certificate of occupancy sounds administrative and is in fact the strongest record in the system, because it cannot issue until the required inspections have been passed — and it is unavailable to most Chicago homes, since single-family houses and two- and three-flats do not require one.
The same inversion runs through the enforcement end. A violation reads as bad news about a building and is, among other things, proof that the building was examined. An address with no violations may be a well-kept building or a building nobody has ever entered, and the public record contains nothing that lets a reader tell those apart. Neither of those facts is visible in the name of the record.
What the groupings do not say
Sorting records by what they are evidence of does not rank them, and none of it is advice. A record in the third grouping is not worse than one in the first; it is evidence of something different. A reader looking at a building with one open violation and a complete inspection history is looking at better evidence than a reader looking at a building with a clean sheet and nothing behind it. What the groupings do is stop the two commonest mistakes made with this material: treating an approval as though somebody checked, and treating an empty record as though somebody looked and found nothing.
Nor is the weight of a record the same for every building. The recurring inspection regimes exclude most small residential buildings outright, so their absence at a two-flat means nothing at all and their absence at a large multi-unit building means a great deal. The groupings describe the structure of the evidence, not its significance at your address, and the structure is what stays true.
The three groupings, weakest evidence first
Permission was granted — 8 records
Everything in this grouping was created before the work existed. The City was told what would be done, somebody decided it was allowed, and a record was made of that decision. Who did the deciding varies from City plan reviewers reading the drawings to nobody reading anything, and the record format does not distinguish those cases. Read these as evidence that a transaction happened, never as evidence about a building.
Somebody attended — 7 records
These records exist because a person attended. That makes them the strongest evidence this system produces — and the scarcest, because Chicago publishes no standalone buildings inspections dataset and a passed inspection generally leaves no public trace at all. Several of them are also self-reported by a professional the owner engaged rather than written by a City inspector, which is a real distinction and is stated on each page.
Something was found wrong — 3 records
Enforcement records say what failed. They are durable evidence that the City examined this building on this date and wrote something down, which for many Chicago properties is the only public trace that an inspector ever came. Their limit is the mirror of their strength: a finding is a snapshot of a condition on a date, the status fields describe a file rather than a building, and the City's own dataset tells transaction parties not to rely on it.