Study 1 — Corridors
South Shore
A neighborhood screened as weak. Its strongest corridor scored nearly twice as high.
Written for institutions screening markets · Lenders, developers, brokers, economic development organizations
neighborhood investment readiness, out of 100
35.7
top-scoring corridor, same public data
66.4
The challenge
On a neighborhood-level screen, South Shore reads as one of Chicago's weaker markets, and institutions screening at that level move on. But a community area is not one market. The screen that produces that verdict averages across every street inside it, which means the places where reinvestment is actually happening disappear into the same number as the places where it is not.
The outcome
Scored corridor by corridor on the same public records, the commercial streets inside South Shore behave nothing like each other. The strongest reads far above the neighborhood figure, and a single corridor carries permit value in the hundreds of millions that the neighborhood average absorbs completely. The full study publishes every corridor score, the peer benchmarking behind it, and the limits on how the ranking may be used.
What the study found
Three things worth knowing.
- The community area scores 35.7 out of 100. The five corridors inside it span 36.4 to 66.4 on the same public data, which is the whole point of measuring below the neighborhood average.
- Business density reads 8.3 active business licenses per 1,000 residents against a peer average of 11.4.
- Permit intensity reads 16.0 permits per 1,000 housing units against a peer average of 24.1, while a single corridor carries $380,555,600 in permit value.
Read this before quoting a figure
Dimension scores are min-max normalized within these five corridors only. A score of 100 means highest of these five, not excellent. A score of 0 means lowest of these five, not none. These are ranks expressed on a 0-100 scale, not absolute grades.
Go deeper
The full study.
High-level takeaways, published openly. The full corridor scoring, the charts and the underwriting brief sit behind the study.
Read the full study
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South Shore and Uptown are separate products, separate markets and separate buyers. Neither study is used as evidence for or against the other.
Read the Uptown study