Jeremy Glover Profile picture
Active transportation 🚲🚶🚇 • Climate and land use 🌳🌆 • Chicago politics 🌬️ • Dad x2 • Tweets and opinions my own • he/him

Sep 17, 2023, 6 tweets

I generated a population heat map for Chicago using a cool dataset that places people inside residential building footprints rather than census blocks. This yields a much more realistic view of population density. Lots of interesting things to observe. (1/6)

This pocket of Streeterville ⬇️ has the highest population density in the city, followed by Gold Coast, Lakeshore East, and South Loop. Next after that is a long and narrow strip from Lakeview to Uptown along the lakefront. (2/6)

This stretch of the lakefront in Lincoln Park is dramatically underbuilt compared to the rest of the North Side. Not hard to guess why. (3/6)

Some other density hot spots are Little Village, Rogers Park, Devon Street in West Ridge, Albany Park near the Brown line, and the lakefront high rises in Kenwood and Hyde Park.

Also showing up bright: the Pavilion Apartments near O'Hare! I didn't know they existed. (4/6)

On the flip side, the darker areas are either non-residential, places built at lower densities, and places that have suffered disinvestment. Particularly notable are Englewood and West Englewood. The arrow points to "the area" where Norfolk Southern displaced 400 families. (5/6)

Credit for the underlying data goes to Forest Gregg, who has departed these shores for the Other Place (fgregg[at]mastodon[dot]social). It's a very neat dataset that you can find at the link below. I used the 5-per-dot version. (6/6)
bunkum.us/chicago-dots/

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