Answers · Chicago building permits
How do I find out who pulled a permit at an address in Chicago?
Query the City of Chicago's building permit file, dataset ydr8-5enu, by street number and street name. The address columns are street_number, street_direction and street_name. Each matching record returns the permit number, permit type, issue date, work description, reported cost and the parties attached to the permit.
The file is public and needs no account or API key, so an address lookup is a single HTTP request. The address arrives as three separate columns; a display address is those three joined, which is how this site renders them.
Permit numbers are the stable key. Once you have one, it identifies that permit in the City's file for good, which is why every record this site publishes links back by permit number rather than by address.
How this is measured
- Dataset
- ydr8-5enu
- Publisher
- City of Chicago
- Filter
- Address match on street_number and street_name, returned as issued by the City. No enrichment, no estimated owner, no inferred contact.
- Measured
- No count on this page — it describes the file and the query, and carries no figure to date.
The query
$where=street_number = '{number}' AND upper(street_name) LIKE '%{STREET}%'Permit Signal
Permit Signal does this every morning for a whole trade instead of one address. The first delivery is three real records, free, with the government source link on every row.