Chicago
Stories from the Chicago Data Portal — fourteen million 311 service requests, the city's seventy-seven community areas, the subsidized housing register, and the long arc of administrative data that maps onto a century of segregation.
Stories
Three buckets, one verdict
Chicago classifies every food establishment into one of three risk tiers — High, Medium, Low — that govern how often the city inspects them. Across more than 100,000 inspections since 2020, those three buckets fail at indistinguishable rates. The tier predicts cadence; not outcome. Where the real variation lives: facility type and the trigger that brought the inspector through the door.
The maintenance gap
Chicago has subsidized thousands of affordable rental units across its seventy-seven community areas. The streetlights outside them stay dark longer. A first look at whether the city maintains its public right-of-way at the same speed where its housing investments are most concentrated.
When Chicago calls
Chicago picks up the 311 phone at every hour, but the shape of who calls — and what for — changes around the clock. Four service-request categories, four distinct rhythms, one 24-hour dial. Street Light Out peaks at 9 p.m.; Rodent Baiting clusters at 10 a.m.; Aircraft Noise tracks O'Hare's commute lobes.
The swimmer's safety gauge
Chicago Park District buoys publish hourly water temperature, wave height, and turbidity from Lake Michigan. The 24-hour lab E. coli result lags the swimmer's afternoon by a full day. Walking through the last summer of six-sensor coverage — and the slow collapse of the network to one.
Datasets
Chicago 311 service requests
Live snapshot of Chicago's consolidated 311 service requests, ~13.8M rows from 2018 onward. Queried via SODA v3 against data.cityofchicago.org through our Cloudflare worker proxy. Aircraft noise from O'Hare flight paths competes with graffiti, potholes, and rodent baiting for the top-ten slots — a different texture from NYC or Philly.
Chicago Affordable Rental Housing Developments
Every municipally subsidized, deed-restricted rental property the Department of Housing tracks. ~600 rows, joins to 311 and Health Atlas via community area number. Excludes Naturally Occurring Affordable Housing (NOAH) and Housing Choice Voucher placements — what the city directly subsidizes, not the entire affordable stock.
Chicago beach water-quality automated sensors
Hourly Lake Michigan telemetry from Park District buoys at six Chicago beaches: water temperature, wave height, wave period, turbidity, and battery life. Six sensors at the 2014–2015 peak; only Ohio Street Beach is actively reporting in 2026. Companion to the city's 24-hour-lab E. coli advisory.
Chicago food inspections
Every routine canvass, license, and complaint-driven food-establishment inspection by the Chicago Department of Public Health since 2010 — restaurants, daycares, schools, grocers, long-term-care kitchens. ~310K rows. Anonymized at the inspector level: per-sanitarian variance isn't recoverable from the public release. July 2018 schema break.