Bad headlines,
real opportunity.
A working session with Community Investment Corporation & the Preservation Compact — AI-synthesized, corridor-level evidence for where NOAH loss happens first.
Where CIC and the Compact operate today
A 50-year-old CDFI and its preservation program, working from the same tools most of the field relies on.
Multifamily lending
Acquisition, rehab, refinance, and energy-retrofit lending for 5+ unit rental buildings across Chicago.
NOAH protection
Policy collaborative focused on preventing loss of naturally occurring affordable housing before it's gone.
- Outreach and lending focus today is guided by inbound deal flow, citywide/community-area statistics, and institutional memory.
- Those tools work — but they're built at a resolution that misses what happens block by block.
Does that match what you're actually seeing day to day — or are we missing something about how this works today?
The aggregate is a discount, not a summary
Public data exists — permits, licenses, 311, crime, sales — but it's scattered across portals that don't talk to each other, and reported at the neighborhood level.
A neighborhood-wide number blends a stable corridor with a distressed one two blocks away. The average doesn't just simplify the picture — it hides the exact signal a lender or preservation strategist needs to act early.
South Shore: the gap, in real numbers
This isn't hypothetical — it's a neighborhood Tubman has already scored. The community-area average sits at 35.7/100. Its five corridors range from 36.4 to 66.4 on the exact same public data.
Outside institutions already agree. A TIF district, a Special Service Area, and a city corridor-redesign proposal all independently target this same pair of corridors — Tubman's model found them from public permit, license, and crime data alone, with no knowledge of policy or planning.
Stony Island Ave and Jeffery Blvd are Tubman's two strongest corridors — which one ranks #1 is still being refined.
Business turnover leads a sale by months
Small commercial tenants are more rent-sensitive than the buildings around them — they turn over first. A rising license-lapse rate signals disinvestment before a residential sale happens.
Lapsed = distinct licenses touching the current window minus licenses currently active, per corridor. Real, repeatable calculation — not an estimate.
Resident Sentiment: the second leading signal
311 requests are citizen-reported, not inspection outcomes. A shift from upkeep complaints to distress complaints shows deterioration before a violation is ever cited.
South Shore
A distress signal — physical housing decline.
Pilsen
Routine upkeep — not distress.
Gr. Chinatown
Routine upkeep — not distress.
South Shore's problems read as structural. Pilsen's and Chinatown's read as ordinary maintenance — a real, qualitative difference, not just a volume count. In the platform, this is labeled Resident Sentiment, not "311 requests."
Corridor-level scorecards, not neighborhood averages
- Synthesizes free, public data into corridor-level scorecards, built on Tubman's model — permits, license lapse, resident sentiment, crime, sales/assessed value.
- Every figure is sourced, versioned, and dated — and checked against independent public benchmarks, not just self-reported.
- A plain-language "read" accompanies every scorecard — synthesis, not a raw data dump.
Eight public sources, one scorecard
Everything below is free and public. Nothing is licensed, scraped, or proprietary at the source.
City of Chicago Data Portal (permits, licenses, crime, 311, ACS) + Cook County Assessor/Data Catalog (assessed value, parcel sales) + DePaul IHS, Illinois Realtors, and FHFA as cross-validation sources. Every published figure carries its source, query logic, and pull date.
Cross-validation, not self-comparison: Uptown's price index came out to 135.2 on Tubman's method — independently, FHFA's own index puts the same corridor at 138.2–136.8. A different data source, a different institution, landing within a few points of Tubman's number.
What goes in, what comes out
Raw public data, per corridor per interval, flows into one synthesis engine — and a scorecard comes out the other side. Watch it move. The logic that connects them stays proprietary.
Scoring weights & corridor-selection logic stay proprietary — not shown here.
Three corridors, one method — a fourth, built differently
South Shore, Pilsen, and Greater Chinatown share the same five-metric corridor scorecard. Uptown is a separate case study, built to answer a different question — how home values move by property type — with the same commitment to sourced, public data.
South Shore
Pilsen
Gr. Chinatown
Uptown
One method for three corridors, a different one for a fourth — sourced and dated either way.
Let's look at the actual product
Corridor selector → scorecard → drill-down → side-by-side comparison → sources panel. Real data, not mocked values, for everything the model shows.
Real screens, real numbers
Four live corridor studies — and what happens the moment you click into one.
Same product, live — not a mockup. Every number shown carries a source and a pull date, one click away.
Infrastructure you hold, not a report you commission
Most vendors in this space — Placer.ai, PolicyMap, CoStar — sell per-deal or per-report tools: evidence assembled to win one pitch, then set aside. That's not the offer here.
Tubman is proposing CIC as a design partner for a standing, always-current corridor intelligence layer — held and queried continuously, like a data subscription line, not commissioned per deal.
- Near-term: today's four corridors, deepened with CIC and the Compact's own priority corridors and their partner's, and built around your actual workflow and data needs.
- Longer-term vision: a resident-sentiment layer as its own signal beyond the 311 proxy, and a market directory connecting CIC and the Compact to developers, investors, and other CRE stakeholders — with a path to scale the platform statewide, then national.
A design partnership, not a sale
- Direct work with CIC's and the Compact's team
- Stakeholder analysis and stakeholder meetings
- Your specific user requirements and data needs, built into the product
- Discounted Tubman pricing in perpetuity, as an early design partner
Dedicated AI/ML consulting beyond this scope is billed separately — $7,500/mo or $150/hr — and isn't part of the baseline partnership.
One of a target three paid design partners.
This buys influence over what gets built — a design partner's seat, not a customer's login.
What the four months look like
Same partnership, broken into stages — each one building on what CIC and the Compact actually need.
Community,
reimagined.
Tubman is named for the belief that the right information, in the right hands, changes where people can build a life. That's what this platform is for.
Jaquis Covington · Founder, Tubman
jaquiscovington@gmail.com · tubmanstar.com