Every week there are new stories in the Chicago media highlighting new real estate investments, announcing new projects, discussing new or existing community assets, or describing the ways neighborhood residents are responding to housing market and demographic changes in their communities.
In 2019, IHS developed a tool that maps these stories alongside our Mapping Displacement Pressure typologies in order to contextualize these stories within their neighborhood market context. Recently, IHS updated this Mapping Stories of Neighborhood Change interactive tool to include our updated Mapping Displacement Pressure data and news stories that were published in 2020.
These new stories describe the ways that COVID-19 has impacted neighborhood businesses and housing affordability, efforts to create and preserve affordable housing for older adults, new investments in Chicago’s South and West Sides, and many other topics. In the map, you’ll find stories that:
- Profile the variation of activity and impacts from large-scale projects, speculative investment, and equitable development, among others
- Describe efforts taken by residents to protect communities from becoming unaffordable
- Summarize strategies proposed and implemented by housing advocates and practitioners to protect existing affordable housing and generate additional affordable options
- Cover the impacts of new investment and increased affordability pressures on local institutions, small business owners, and their clientele
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. The mapping tool will be 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.
