Chicago commercial building operations research
Chicago–Naperville–Elgin, IL–IN MSA · CBSA 16980
OMB Bulletin 23-01 / July 2023 delineation
STATESIllinois · Indiana
Factum is mapping high-complexity commercial buildings across the official 13-county Chicago–Naperville–Elgin metropolitan statistical area. The census remains partial. Cook County currently has a 4,645-record bounded candidate denominator. A separate historical DuPage County source slice returned 6,079 footprint polygons in Wayne and Winfield townships, including 320 records under a transparent classified-footprint and 10,000-square-foot screen. The first 150 screened footprints have now been reconciled in six ordered 25-record batches against DuPage’s county parcel layer. Batch six produced 35 candidate intersections across 35 PINs, with four multi-parcel footprints, no PIN shared within the batch, and two PINs recurring from earlier batches. These are candidate spatial relationships—not physical-building identity merges or completeness counts.
What the current denominator means
Chicago is Factum’s first live-validation market and the deepest operating-graph lane. Public records establish the building universe; first-party operating documents and contributed field evidence progressively resolve how work actually gets done.
City of Chicago covered-building rows
Municipal energy-benchmarking program records; a program row is not automatically a physical-building identity.
Cook County suburban latest key-PIN candidates
Commercial assessment candidates screened by source-reported building area; a PIN may represent part of a building, multiple structures, or a campus.
DuPage Wayne/Winfield historical footprint polygons
Aerial-derived footprint polygons concentrated in Wayne and Winfield townships. The imagery vintage is 2006–2008; this is neither countywide nor a current physical-building denominator. A reproducible BldgType > 0 and footprint-area >=10,000-square-foot screen returns 320 source records, but the county source does not publish the type-code semantics. The first 150 records ordered by OBJECTID were reconciled in six fixed 25-record batches without accepting identity merges.
DuPage County hosted assessment parcel polygons
Countywide parcel polygons with weekly joined real-estate attributes. Parcel, footprint, building and campus identities are different grains; the service metadata also carries an older assessment-year caveat.
Questions this page answers
Compact answers are rendered in visible HTML and structured data so people and answer engines can retrieve the same claims and caveats.
01How many commercial buildings has Factum identified in metro Chicago?+
Factum currently has a 4,645-record bounded Cook County candidate denominator. DuPage adds a separate 6,079-footprint Wayne/Winfield historical slice and a 337,341-parcel county layer. They are not added together because program rows, candidate PINs, footprint polygons and parcels are different grains. The 13-county physical-building census remains incomplete.
02What does Graph Mapped mean?+
Graph Mapped means a record has a resolved working identity, structured claims, evidence, relationships, conflicts, and explicit unknowns. It does not mean the record has been independently verified or is safe to use for dispatch.
03Is the Chicago building dataset complete?+
No. Factum does not claim completeness until all 13 counties have documented source coverage, denominators, duplicate resolution, and independent reconciliation.
04What happened to the 107 Cook County records that did not match the 2025 Parcel Universe?+
Factum reproduced and hash-pinned the exact 107-key cohort. A current Cook County parcel layer corroborates 95 keys and leaves 12 unmatched, but two matched keys return multiple parcel features. The official 2025 Parcel Addresses crosswalk returned no rows for the exact keys or their listed PINs, so no address, municipality, building, or campus identity was inferred.
05What did the DuPage footprint-to-parcel sample show?+
Factum has reconciled the first 150 screened footprint records by OBJECTID in six fixed batches. All 150 had at least one parcel candidate. The sixth batch produced 35 candidate edges across 35 distinct PINs, with four multi-parcel footprints at positions 131, 137, 139 and 143. No PIN was shared by two footprints inside the batch. PIN 0415200010 recurs at prior position 123 and current position 127; PIN 0405303005 recurs at prior position 90 and current position 137. The duplicate audit re-queried positions 1–125 from the current official source and does not claim byte-identical historical recovery. These results expose identity risk; they do not establish that a footprint, parcel or building is the same entity.
06What kinds of buildings are being prioritized?+
The first queue emphasizes large, operationally complex commercial properties where access, freight, insurance, contractor, telecom, and coordination knowledge is repeatedly valuable.
Published building records
Explicit unknowns
These are active research requirements—not footnotes to be smoothed over.
- 01Counter reconciliation: the operating census has 96 rows labeled Graph mapped while the canonical governed counter is 93. Three pre-existing historical rows remain outside the governed counter because their receipt or read-back attribution is unresolved; they are not silently promoted.
- 02Complete source coverage for all 13 counties in the official MSA. Cook and DuPage now have bounded source manifests; both remain partial, and the other 11 counties lack accepted source manifests.
- 03Official semantics for DuPage footprint BldgType and SubType codes. Numeric codes are not interpreted as commercial, industrial or institutional without a county codebook.
- 04Currentness and redistribution boundaries for the DuPage footprint layer. Its service name contains 2024, but the metadata says the footprints were derived from 2006–2008 aerial photography and asserts county copyright.
- 05Building-to-parcel identity for the DuPage slice. One parcel may contain multiple footprints and one footprint may intersect multiple parcels; no identity merge has been accepted.
- 06Resolution of the first DuPage batch's seven multi-parcel footprint candidates, including footprint OBJECTID 160 with 40 intersecting parcels, and PIN 0408406012 intersecting footprint OBJECTIDs 35 and 136.
- 07Resolution of the second DuPage batch's seven multi-parcel footprints: OBJECTIDs 288, 359, 593, 601, 683, 763 and 870. OBJECTID 870 intersects seven parcel candidates.
- 08Immutable recovery for DuPage positions 1–25. The cross-batch audit replayed those positions from the current official layer because the original artifact was unavailable; no byte identity or historic-moment equivalence is claimed.
- 09Resolution of 1,556 suburban candidate records that list multiple PINs.
- 10Explanation of the source-time difference between the certified 2025 Parcel Universe and the current parcel layer: the exact 107-key cohort is recovered, but the current layer corroborates 95, leaves 12 unmatched, and returns one-to-many features for two keys.
- 11Authoritative address and municipality evidence for the 107-key cohort. The official tax-year-2025 Parcel Addresses query returned zero rows for the 107 keys and their listed PINs; absence from that source is not evidence that a parcel or building does not exist.
- 12Physical-building and campus identity for candidate rows whose source semantics are parcel-, account-, or program-level.
- 13Independent verification and live-job audit for every graph-mapped building.
- 14Resolution of the third DuPage batch's eight multi-parcel footprints: OBJECTIDs 1247, 1303, 1304, 1309, 1412, 1513, 1601 and 1627.
- 15Resolution of the fourth DuPage batch's six multi-parcel footprints at positions 89, 91, 95, 96, 97 and 100; position 100 intersects six parcel candidates.
- 16Identity scope for within-batch shared PINs 0405306011 (positions 77 and 83) and 0416202082 (positions 96 and 97), plus cross-batch PINs 0416202072 (positions 95 and 53) and 0416202082 (current positions 96–97 and prior positions 54–55, 57). These are candidate spatial relationships, not accepted building or campus merges.
- 17Resolution of the fifth DuPage batch's seven multi-parcel footprints at positions 105, 106, 110, 111, 113, 115 and 116; within-batch shared PINs 0410505005 (positions 113 and 115) and 0416202077 (positions 105 and 106); and cross-batch candidates 0409102009 (positions 33 and 108) and 0416202082 (prior positions 54, 55, 57, 96 and 97 plus current position 106). The 1–100 comparison is a current-source replay, not byte-identical historical recovery, and none of these relationships is an accepted building or campus merge.
- 18Resolution of the sixth DuPage batch’s four multi-parcel footprints at positions 131, 137, 139 and 143; position 139 intersects six parcel candidates. Cross-batch candidates 0415200010 (positions 123 and 127) and 0405303005 (positions 90 and 137) remain candidate spatial relationships, not accepted building or campus merges. The 1–125 comparison is a current-source replay, not byte-identical historical recovery.
Sources and scope
Public-page claims are limited to what the cited sources support. Source records, parcels, accounts, footprints, campuses, and physical buildings remain distinct identities until reconciled.
- 01U.S. Census Bureau metropolitan delineation files ↗
Federal government · Supports: Canonical CBSA identity and boundary vintage
- 02Chicago Energy Benchmarking — Covered Buildings ↗
City of Chicago · Supports: Bounded City covered-building source layer
- 03Cook County Assessor open data ↗
Cook County Assessor · Supports: Commercial assessment and parcel reconciliation sources
- 04Cook County Assessor — Parcel Universe ↗
Cook County Assessor · Supports: Tax-year-2025 parcel reconciliation for the Cook commercial-valuation candidate slice; parcel records are not physical-building identities
- 05Cook County Hosted Parcel Feature Layer ↗
Cook County GIS · Supports: Current parcel-layer corroboration for 95 of the exact 107 keys; the layer does not establish building, campus, address, or municipality identity
- 06Cook County Assessor — Parcel Addresses ↗
Cook County Assessor · Supports: Official PIN-grain property street, city, state and ZIP crosswalk; a complete tax-year-2025 query returned zero rows for the exact 107 keys and their listed PINs
- 07CMAP Northeastern Illinois Development Database ↗
Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning · Supports: Independent regional development reconciliation path
- 08DuPage County 2024 WC Building Footprints Service ↗
DuPage County Information Technology Department, GIS Division · Supports: Bounded Wayne/Winfield footprint denominator, source fields, geometry grain and imagery-vintage limitation
- 09DuPage County Parcels with Real Estate ↗
DuPage County IT GIS Division and DuPage County Clerk · Supports: Countywide parcel denominator, PIN-grain reconciliation fields and assessment-vintage limitation
Public change history
Only meaningful, accepted public deltas appear here. The current record above remains canonical.
Chicago
Factum extended the bounded DuPage County footprint-to-parcel reconciliation through positions 126–150: 35 candidate intersections across 35 PINs, four multi-parcel footprints, no within-batch shared PIN and two cross-batch repeated candidates, with no identity merge or completeness claim.
Chicago
Factum extended the bounded DuPage County footprint-to-parcel reconciliation through positions 76–100, preserving 38 candidate edges, shared-PIN cases, cross-batch duplicates and source-grain limits without accepting an identity merge or completeness claim.
Chicago
Chicago entered Factum's public metro research library with 4645 bounded source records, 9 attributable sources and its denominator limits kept explicit.
Chicago
Chicago entered Factum's public metro research library with 4645 bounded source records, 9 attributable sources and its denominator limits kept explicit.