Mapping the news: 11 years of Chicago development coverage — and the gaps

Chicago Cityscape has been collecting development-related news articles since May 2015 — nearly 11 years of headlines, renderings, announcements and groundbreakings, and sometimes local issues. Our news gallery now includes more than 1,700 published stories that are tied to our maps. We encourage members and non-members alike to peruse the news map in the places they look up to learn about some of the new projects happening in that area.

Coverage comes from outlets across the spectrum of Chicago journalism: Block Club Chicago leads the collection with nearly 650 articles, followed by Crain's Chicago Business, the Chicago Sun-Times, Urbanize Chicago, the Chicago Tribune, Chicago YIMBY, WBEZ, WTTW, and South Side Weekly, among others.

Each article is tied to a specific address or project, which means every story is also on the map. You can browse them on our News Map, where articles are organized by community area and publication.

We recently added two summary tables to the News Map. 

1. How many articles we've collected from each publication
2. The distribution of news articles across each of the 77 community areas. This is how we learned that we've collected only one news article about something happening in the Mount Greenwood community area.

Development doesn't stop at the neighborhoods that tend to dominate press coverage. Projects in tens of community areas often go undocumented in our collection — not because nothing is happening, but because fewer outlets cover them consistently. When a community area shows few articles next to one with dozens, that's a signal for us to look harder.

Mount Greenwood no longer has just one article.

If you know of a news article about a Chicago development project that belongs in our collection, let us know.