What can be built here: zoning by community area
How much of each community area’s land is locked to single-unit houses — and how much allows two-flats, apartments, or commerce? Search your address to see your area, or click any community area on the map. Switch between single-unit-only land, two-flat & multi-unit land, and business & commercial land.
How to read this map
Each community area is shaded by the share of its zoned land in one family. Single-unit only (RS) is land in Chicago’s RS districts, where nothing denser than a detached house can be built by right — the darker the fill, the more of the area is locked to that one use. This is the city’s exclusionary-zoning number, and it is a genuinely contested civic fact. Two-flat & multi-unit (RT+RM) is land that allows two-flats, townhouses, and apartments. Business & commercial (B+C) is the B and C districts.
We weight by land area, not by counting districts: a single large district shouldn’t count the same as a small one when the question is how much land is reserved for what. Each zoning district is apportioned to the community areas it overlaps by the area it contributes. The drawer shows the full breakdown — RS, RT+RM, B+C, manufacturing (M), downtown (D), parks & transportation (POS+T), and planned developments (PD), which are negotiated per site and shown as their own class.
Source: City of Chicago zoning districts (open data), collapsed to families by the district code’s letter prefix. See methodology for the family definitions and coverage details.