On May 22, 2013, the Chicago Board of Education voted to close 49 elementary schools in one action. No school district in the United States had ever closed so many at once. This paper is a synthesis of the published record on that decision paired with our own descriptive analysis of public data. We did not run an experiment, interview anyone, scrape anything, or estimate a causal effect. What we did was build a map. We took the closed-school roster, 53 buildings transcribed from a primary-source list and geocoded to Chicago community areas, and set it against the 661-school system that was still operating three years later, in school year 2016-17. The picture is plain. The closures touched only 27 of the city's 77 community areas, and 49 of the 53 buildings sat on the South or West Side. Five community areas absorbed nearly two in five closures. Almost every building was a neighborhood elementary school, and not one high school was on the list. In the neighborhoods that lost the most, the schools left standing were still overwhelmingly Black and overwhelmingly poor in 2016-17. We connect those patterns to peer-reviewed work that documents who was displaced, what the action cost teachers and children, and why the under-enrollment metric that justified the closures had decades of housing segregation already baked into it. We are strict about the seam between what our map can show and what it cannot. A snapshot describes a footprint. It does not prove a cause. Every claim about harm stays where it belongs, with the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research and the published studies.
Published by Zain Zaidi·May 2026
Education·Chicago·Data Analysis
18 citations
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A Cook County homeowner who believes the Assessor has overvalued the house can contest that value, in writing, for no fee. This paper follows that ordinary act from the mailed notice to the certified verdict and asks a plain question. Who files these appeals, and who actually wins them. We keep two kinds of evidence strictly apart. First, we synthesize a peer-reviewed and government literature that documents, with race and income data and causal methods we do not have, that Cook County assessments were long regressive and that appeal relief tends to flow unevenly toward commercial owners and better-resourced homeowners. Second, we offer our own descriptive read of 5,000 real Cook County Assessor appeal records, of which 99.2 percent fall in tax year 2003, drawn from Cook County Open Data. Defining a win as a certified total assessed value below the mailed total, the taxpayer's real economic outcome, we find that 32.7 percent of scored 2003 appeals won a cut, 67.2 percent changed nothing, and 0.1 percent came back higher. The win rate splits hard by what kind of property is contested. Land won 60.4 percent of the time, commercial 44.7 percent, residential 37.1 percent, and condo and co-op owners just 9.6 percent. A commercial appeal was roughly 4.6 times as likely to win as a condo or co-op appeal. The gap between who files and who wins is just as sharp. Condo and co-op owners filed 23.6 percent of appeals and collected 7.0 percent of the wins, while commercial owners filed 21.6 percent and took 29.5 percent. Among winners, the median cut ran from 7.0 percent for residences to near total for a small tail of vacant land. First-stage win rates spanned 19.9 to 44.6 percent across seven townships, a 24.7-point spread. Our records carry no race, income, or sale-price field, cover one cycle, and stop at the Assessor's first stage, so every regressivity-by-race-or-income claim here rests on the cited literature and none of it on us.
Published by Zain Zaidi·April 2026
Housing·Chicago·Data Analysis
11 citations
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A traffic stop record is built to answer a short list of questions. Who was stopped, where, when, for what, and what happened. This paper takes a 4,999-row sample of historical Chicago police stop records, released through the Stanford Open Policing Project from Chicago Police Department data, and treats it as an object to be examined rather than a ledger to be trusted. The work has two parts that stay separate throughout. One is a synthesis of published policing research. The other is our own descriptive tabulation of that public file, counts and shares only, with nothing modeled and nothing imputed. The decisive feature of the sample is what it withholds. Subject race is recorded for 100 percent of arrest outcomes but 1.8 percent of citation outcomes, and it is blank for 73.3 percent of all rows, so any race-by-outcome rate computed from this file describes who was arrested, not who was stopped. We report a racial composition only for the near-complete arrest subset (565 Black, 415 Hispanic, 256 White, 15 Asian or Pacific Islander), label it as an arrest descriptive each time it appears, and decline to read a stop-level disparity out of it. The outside literature, national and Chicago-specific, has already settled that disparity question on far stronger data, including a national analysis of roughly 100 million stops and a 2024 study that benchmarked Chicago police stops against the racial mix of drivers actually on the road. Our point is the narrower and more methodological one. Using the city's own records, we show the Knox, Lowe, and Mummolo result in miniature, that administrative data can hide the bias it is asked to reveal, and we mark exactly where honest analysis of a file like this has to stop. The paper's argument is that the silence in these records is not an obstacle to the analysis. It is the most informative thing the records contain.
Published by Zain Zaidi·April 2026
Policing·Chicago·Data Analysis
12 citations
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Chicago sells tax increment financing as a way to steer public dollars into blighted, disinvested places that private capital skips. This paper follows the money to see where the approved subsidy actually lands. It is a synthesis of the published Chicago TIF literature paired with our own descriptive reading of the city's records, namely 768 approved TIF and redevelopment-agreement projects from 1986 through 2026, carrying about 6.57 billion dollars in committed subsidy. We did not run an experiment, model causation, or audit disbursements. We counted, summed, ranked, and mapped what the city itself recorded. The pattern is stark. The top five single named community areas, led by the Near South Side, the Loop, and the Near West Side, hold roughly 52.6 percent of all community-area-tagged dollars, and the Gini coefficient across community areas reaches 0.710. Project counts and dollar totals pull apart, which separates neighborhoods stitched from many small deals from downtown blocks built on a few enormous ones. Approvals were a rounding error in the 1980s and peaked in the 2010s. A long line of Chicago-specific research, from Dye and Merriman through Weber and a recent wave of equity analyses, predicts and documents exactly this concentration. The limits are hard and we keep them in view. Approved is not disbursed, three records span multiple community areas, and affordable-unit counts exist for only a fifth of projects. The records describe where the money goes. They do not show what it caused.
Published by Zain Zaidi·March 2026
Economic Development·Chicago·Data Analysis
11 citations
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The Home Mortgage Disclosure Act file records who applies for a mortgage in Chicago, who is approved, who is turned away, and at roughly what price. It leaves out the one number lenders weigh most, namely the applicant's credit score. This paper joins the published lending literature to a fresh descriptive reading of the real public HMDA registers for Cook County from 2018 through 2023, a pooled body of 1,466,670 credit decisions. The approach is an anatomy of a single application, traced from the lender's decision to the geography it lands in. The disparities are large and they hold. Black applicants were denied at 34.1 percent against 14.4 percent for non-Hispanic white applicants, a ratio of 2.37 to 1, with Latino applicants at 26.5 percent and Asian applicants at 17.6 percent. The ordering does not break in any of the six years. Income, the only serious control the public file allows, barely moves the result. Inside the highest income band the Black-white gap is still 17.7 percentage points. Among borrowers a lender already approved, 18.6 percent of Black borrowers received a higher-priced loan against 2.6 percent of white borrowers, a gap wider than the one at the door. Lending concentrates in a short list of institutions tilted heavily toward white borrowers. One planned test came back empty. The 1938 redlining grade of a Chicago tract does not predict its modern denial rate. Following recent Federal Reserve evidence, we read all of this as the careful measurement of a raw disparity, not as proof of present-day discrimination, because the missing credit score puts that claim out of reach.
Published by Zain Zaidi·March 2026
Housing·Chicago·Data Analysis
12 citations
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Every eviction starts as a line in a court docket. A landlord files, names a tenant, states a sum owed, and asks a judge to order the household out. That line is the earliest part of the process that leaves a permanent, countable record, and it is the unit this paper uses. We ask a narrow question. Where in Chicago do those filings pile up, and does the pattern hold? Working from a decade of Cook County eviction records cleaned and geocoded by the Law Center for Better Housing for 2010 through 2019, we describe where residential eviction filings concentrate and how little that geography shifts. The paper is a synthesis of published research set beside our own descriptive reading of one real public dataset. We make no causal claim. Citywide, the mean annual filing rate over the decade was 3.70 per 100 rental units. A small cluster of South and West Side community areas ran roughly two to three times that, led by Riverdale at 9.39 and South Shore at 8.73, against North Side neighborhoods like North Center at 0.64. South Shore was the only community area to sit in the top ten by filing rate in all ten years, and its rate never fell below 8.04 even as citywide filings dropped about a quarter. Ten community areas carried 38 percent of the decade's filings on 25 percent of its rental stock. In completed cases, landlords had a lawyer 80.6 percent of the time and tenants 11.0 percent. Most filings sought under 2,500 dollars. We report these patterns plainly and mark their limits.
Published by Zain Zaidi·February 2026
Displacement·Chicago·Data Analysis
10 citations
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Between 2015 and early 2026, the price of renting a newly listed apartment on Chicago's South Side rose far faster than the area's reputation for disinvestment would lead anyone to expect. This paper traces that climb across 13 South and Southwest Side ZIP codes using the Zillow Observed Rent Index, a monthly asking-rent series, and describes how the index rose between 41 and 81 percent from each ZIP's earliest reading to March 2026. The steepest rises landed in Roseland and West Pullman, in South Shore, and in Bronzeville and Douglas, three of the most historically Black neighborhoods on the South Side. We set that descriptive analysis of real public data next to the published gentrification and displacement literature, which has shown for two decades that neighborhood change in Chicago moves unevenly, slows where Black residency is high, and grows more dangerous to sitting renters when public money flows in. One boundary governs the whole paper. An asking-rent index records what landlords seek from incoming tenants. It does not record what current tenants pay, and it cannot show whether anyone was forced to move, so we read these numbers as mounting affordability pressure and not as measured displacement. We also count the subsidized rental housing already standing in these ZIPs and weigh it against the neighborhoods where market rents are climbing fastest. The buffer is large in places and thin in others, and several of the hottest ZIPs hold among the fewest affordable units. Throughout, we mark where uneven coverage, mismatched baselines, and a static affordable-housing snapshot limit what the data can carry.
Published by Zain Zaidi·February 2026
Displacement·Chicago·Data Analysis
10 citations
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Under almost every street in Chicago runs a short pipe that ties a building to the water main, and for most of the city no one has confirmed what that pipe is made of. This paper pairs published lead research with our own descriptive analysis of one real dataset, the City of Chicago Department of Water Management 2025 service line inventory submitted to the Illinois EPA, compiled and geocoded by Inside Climate News, Grist, and WBEZ and joined to U.S. Census ACS 2023 demographics. We describe how the replacement burden, the share of lines that are lead, galvanized requiring replacement, or unknown and suspected, is spread across 77 community areas and about 800 census tracts. Of 490,945 lines, 412,009 (83.9 percent) require replacement, and more than half have never been verified. The burden falls hardest on lower-income, majority-Black and majority-Latino neighborhoods on the South and West Sides. We report that as cross-sectional correlation, not cause. Replacement so far has reached 1.60 percent of lines and shows no pro-affluent skew. Two checks we ran did not behave as expected, a remediation-equity parallel to Washington and a 1938 redlining overlay, and we report each as it came out. The health stakes belong to the literature we cite. Our numbers describe the shape of a buried risk and the question of who lives above it.
Published by Zain Zaidi·January 2026
Housing·Chicago·Data Analysis
10 citations
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A single vacant lot in Englewood is one row in a spreadsheet the City of Chicago keeps. The spreadsheet is the City-Owned Land Inventory, and on the day we pulled it there were 20,732 rows in it. This paper reads that inventory as a public ledger and asks a narrow question. How much of the city's land does the city still hold, and where does the held land sit. The work is a synthesis of published scholarship and our own descriptive count of one real public dataset. We ran no experiment, fit no model, and interviewed no one, and we make no causal claim. The published record establishes that Chicago's vacant land concentrates in historically redlined Black neighborhoods on the South and West Sides, that land banks and dollar-lot transfers are the policy tools built to return that land to use, and that putting lots back in residents' hands yields measurable gains in upkeep and modest reductions in crime. Our count of the city's ledger lines up with that geography. The five community areas with the most city-owned parcels each hold more than a thousand, and Englewood, New City, North Lawndale, West Englewood, and East Garfield Park together account for 34.2 percent of the inventory. The ledger is held-heavy. The city still owns 58.5 percent of the parcels outright and has sold 29.7 percent. Joining the geocoded parcels to the digitized 1938 Home Owners' Loan Corporation map, 61.9 percent of the parcels inside the mapped area fall in zones the federal corporation graded D, the lowest grade, and the ratio of parcels in declining-or-hazardous zones to parcels in best-or-desirable zones is 53 to one. We scope strictly to city land, not the separately governed Cook County Land Bank Authority, and we report the inventory's missing fields in the body rather than hiding them in a note.
Published by Zain Zaidi·January 2026
Displacement·Chicago·Data Analysis
10 citations
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Chicago's Affordable Requirements Ordinance was meant to fold affordability into the city's building boom, yet the units it has yielded sit mostly where land is already dear. This paper joins a reading of the inclusionary-zoning literature to our own descriptive analysis of the City of Chicago Department of Housing's affordable-rental roster, the public file that flags which developments carry ARO units. We make no causal claim, ran no experiment, and modeled no counterfactual. We count, rank, and cross-tabulate what the file holds, which is 156 ARO-tagged developments and 1,727 affordable units across 24 of Chicago's 77 community areas. ARO is about a quarter of the listed affordable-rental developments but under six percent of the listed units, because each set-aside is a small pocket inside a market-rate building. Those developments concentrate in higher-cost North Side, Northwest Side, and near-downtown community areas, while historically disinvested South and West Side neighborhoods carry long affordable rosters built under other programs and almost no ARO. Median set-aside size is five units. Published research on inclusionary zoning anticipates much of this, tying output to program design, tenure, and program age rather than to housing need. We are direct about what the file cannot show, which is fees collected, units forgone, rents, affordability depth, and any trend over time, and we read the roster as a point-in-time snapshot rather than a complete census of the ordinance. Where we report a number as our own, it comes from that roster and nowhere else. Where a number is borrowed, it is attributed to the work that produced it.
Published by Zain Zaidi·December 2025
Housing·Chicago·Data Analysis
10 citations
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