The City of Chicago permitted 1,802 housing units in January and February in 2016, but only 1,335 in 2017, a reduction of 35 percent. However, 2017 has seen a 12 percent increase over 2015 levels.
Comparably, there were 37 percent more housing units permitted in 2016 than 2015, so it’s likely that 2017 will be more like 2016 than 2015. In 2015 there were 5,750 housing units permitted, versus 9,104 in 2016.
Ninety-one percent of units permitted in 2015 were in multi-unit buildings, and 84 percent of units were in buildings with five or more units. In 2016 those figures were 93 percent and 88 percent respectively.
In 2017 so far, with the available data for January and February, 96 percent of permitted units were in multi-unit buildings, and 90 percent of them are in buildings with five or more units.
The data comes from HUD, which doesn’t count teardowns so it can’t count how many multi-unit buildings are being replaced by single-unit homes.