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Civic Worth is in beta. It’s assembled automatically from public records and can be wrong. Check the official source before you rely on it, and tell us what’s wrong, or see what we’ve corrected.
Methodology
Civic Worth resolves one Columbus address to its parcel and joins the public records that govern it. This page documents every source we draw from, how often each refreshes, how we hold AI-written summaries to those sources, and how to tell us we're wrong. Nothing here is proprietary — it's all public record, cited.
Coverage
Civic Worth currently covers Columbus (Franklin County), Ohio and Chicago (Cook County), Illinois. Connectors for Cleveland / Cuyahoga County are built and tested but not served today: we hold a city to the full data bar before turning it on. Every report and card stamps an as of date that reflects the actual vintage of the data behind it, not the day you opened it.
The neighborhood maps (/columbus/maps) cover the Franklin County portion of Columbus. The city extends a little past the county line — chiefly the Polaris / Far North area in Delaware County, plus a small sliver in Fairfield County (together roughly 3% of the city's land). The maps draw the City's neighborhood boundaries as published, so three of them reach past the county line: Far North (about 42% of its area is in Delaware County), Far East (about 11% is in Fairfield County) and, by a sliver, South East. The parcel maps read Franklin County Auditor records, so those three are counted on their Franklin County side only.
Neighborhood boundaries
Neighborhood boundaries are the City of Columbus’s Columbus Communities planning areas (CC0, as of July 23, 2026). The City notes they aren’t a substitute for area commission boundaries. They include some land outside the city limits: township pockets and two small villages, Minerva Park and Valleyview.
Area commissions are a separate thing. The Columbus maps can draw the City's area commission boundaries as an overlay, but a map never ranks or colors by them. Not every part of Columbus has an area commission: about 64% of the city's parcels are inside one (our count, September 2026). Where there is none, the map says so.
The Chicago maps use the City of Chicago's 77 community areas.
Sources & refresh cadence
Each connector declares a target refresh cadence (below). Ingestion runs on a scheduled and operator-triggered basis; where a source publishes less often than its cadence (the ACS is annual, district boundaries change every cycle), the cadence is the polling target, not a promise the underlying figure changed.
Columbus
| Source | What it provides | Refresh target | License |
|---|---|---|---|
| Franklin County Auditor (Office of Michael Stinziano) | Parcel boundaries, ownership of record, valuation, mailing address | Daily | Public records |
| City of Columbus — Building & Zoning Services | Current zoning + Zone In (new code) districts | Daily | Public records |
| City of Columbus — 311 Customer Service Center | Service requests + code-enforcement complaints | Daily | Public records |
| City of Columbus — Building & Zoning Services (Accela) | Building permits | Daily | Public records |
| City of Columbus — Title 33 (codified via Municode) | Zoning-code ordinance text | Weekly | Public records |
| City of Columbus — Department of Development | Area commission boundaries | Daily | CC0 |
| City of Columbus — Columbus Communities | Community (planning area) boundaries, which the City says aren’t a substitute for area commission boundaries | Weekly | CC0 |
| City of Columbus — Department of Development | Historic districts, design review areas and individually listed historic properties, with the commission or board that reviews each | Monthly | Public records |
| City of Columbus — Department of Technology | City council district boundaries | Annually | CC0 |
| Central Ohio Transit Authority (COTA) | Transit stops, routes & schedules (GTFS) | Weekly | COTA public data |
| City of Columbus — Public Places (libraries) | Public library branch locations | Weekly | CC0 |
| City of Columbus — Recreation & Parks | Recreation center locations | Weekly | CC0 |
| City of Columbus 311 (vacant-structure complaints) | Commercial-vacancy proxy for Storefront Scout (beta) | Daily | Public records |
Ohio statewide
| Source | What it provides | Refresh target | License |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ohio Secretary of State | Election dates & contests | Weekly | Public domain (U.S. Gov) |
| Franklin County Board of Elections | Voting precincts + polling places | Daily | Public domain (U.S. Gov) |
| Ohio Secretary of State — Business Services | Business entity filings + registered agents | Monthly | Public records |
| Ohio Department of Education | School-district report cards (ratings, performance index, graduation) | Annually | Public domain (U.S. Gov) |
| OpenStates / Plural Policy | State Senate & House legislators | Weekly | CC BY 4.0 |
Federal
| Source | What it provides | Refresh target | License |
|---|---|---|---|
| U.S. Census Bureau — American Community Survey (5-year) | Tract & block-group demographics, income, rent, tenure (neighborhood-change widget) | Monthly | Public domain (U.S. Gov) |
| U.S. Census Bureau — TIGER/Line 2024 | Congressional + Ohio state legislative district boundaries | Daily | Public domain (U.S. Gov) |
| NCES EDGE | School-district boundaries | Quarterly | Public domain (U.S. Gov) |
| U.S. Dept. of Housing & Urban Development — HUD User | Fair-market rent + subsidized-housing context | Annually | Public domain (U.S. Gov) |
| U.S. EPA — Envirofacts | TRI, Superfund, brownfield & regulated facilities | Monthly | Public domain (U.S. Gov) |
| Public Environmental Data Partners — EJScreen v2.3 mirror | Environmental-justice screening indicators | Daily | Public domain (U.S. Gov) |
| FEMA — National Flood Hazard Layer | 100-year + 500-year flood zones | Weekly | Public domain (U.S. Gov) |
| FEMA — National Risk Index v1.20 | 18-category natural-hazard risk | Twice a year | Public domain (U.S. Gov) |
| NOAA — Weather Prediction Center HeatRisk | Heat-risk forecast | Daily | Public domain (U.S. Gov) |
| FCC — Broadband Data CollectionNot yet live | Broadband availability by technology | — | Public domain (U.S. Gov) |
| BLS QCEW — illustrative sampleNot yet live | Storefront Scout employment & wages — illustrative county sample modeled on BLS QCEW NAICS-3, not yet a live federal pull | — | Public domain (U.S. Gov) |
| CDC — PLACES | Tract-level health measures | Annually | Public domain (U.S. Gov) |
| First Street™ — Risk FactorNot yet live | Climate risk (flood, fire, heat, wind, air) — paid add-on, contract-gated | — | Licensed (contract) |
Sources tagged Not yet liveare connectors we've built and test but haven't yet wired to live data — no report shows a figure from them, and the relevant parcel surface says so plainly rather than showing a placeholder number. The First Street™ climate add-on is additionally a licensed source served only under contract; the neighborhood-change widget's ACS figures require a configured Census API key.
City of Chicago data
Chicago's 311, building violations, building permits, zoning, and ward/community-area boundaries come from the City of Chicago's open-data portal. The City permits commercial and derivative use of that data on the condition that any application using it displays the City's verbatim disclaimer:
How we hold AI summaries to the record
Some sections are written by a language model (Anthropic's Claude). We never ship an AI-written sentence without a provenance check. Every section's narrative is validated against its typed inputs: every number in the prose must trace to a citation — source name, connector, an as oftimestamp, and the field it came from — and any cited value must appear verbatim in the text. A number that can't be traced fails the build; the section is regenerated or dropped rather than shipped.
Defamation-sensitive sections (code enforcement, ownership) run through an additional non-conclusory-language check: we report observed facts (“associated with”, “consistent with”) and never assert a legal conclusion the record doesn't support.
Owner names & privacy
- Embeds never show an owner-of-record name. The embeddable widgets render civic facts (district, zoning, permits) and tract-level aggregates only — no owner field is fetched or displayed.
- Free previews redact owner names.The owner-of-record name is withheld from the free tier and shown only in paid reports, where it is sourced from the County Auditor's public record.
- Aggregate data carries no PII. The neighborhood-change figures are U.S. Census tract aggregates — they describe an area, never a person.
- You can ask us to access, correct, or delete personal data, or opt out of any sale, via our privacy-request form and do-not-sell page. See the full privacy policy.
Corrections
Public records have errors, and we make mistakes joining them. If something looks wrong for a parcel, tell us — submitting a correction flags the parcel as disputed while we review it, so the next reader sees the dispute immediately.
We correct the join and the cache; we don't alter the underlying public record (we point you to the authoritative source for that). Newsrooms: see the verified-newsroom tier for free reports and embeddable widgets.