Show
Colour scale
Playback speed
1× = 1860 to 2025 in 24 seconds
How to read it
- Each square is one property, sized by floor area.
- Colour shows the year built: blue for the oldest, through green and yellow, to red for the newest.
- Drag the year chart to move through time; hover a building for details.
About this map
Now mapped: Cook County
- 11,100 industrial properties with about 504 million sq ft of floor space. The oldest still standing date back to the 1850s.
- The postwar boom built most of it. Nearly half of today's industrial floor space went up between 1950 and 1979; the 1970s alone added about 95 million sq ft that is still in use.
- Fewer, bigger buildings. Only 17% of the floor space was added after 2000, but the average new property is about 96,000 sq ft, two and a half times the 1950–79 average. For warehouses the jump is almost threefold, to about 164,000 sq ft.
- The move to the suburbs. The typical industrial building in the City of Chicago dates from 1952; in suburban Cook County, from 1974. Nearly four in five square feet built since 2000 are outside the city, led by Elk Grove Village, Bedford Park and Franklin Park.
More counties are on the way.
Data and method
Year built and floor area come from the Cook County Assessor's commercial valuation data for industrial property classes (2023–2025 reassessments), joined to parcel locations from the Assessor's parcel records. Each square is one assessed property, which can include more than one building; the year is the assessor's year built for the main building. A property counts as a warehouse when the assessor records a warehouse or distribution use, or when it sits on a warehouse and distribution site of 100,000 sq ft or more in CMAP's Land Use Inventory 2023. About two-thirds of properties have no recorded use, which is why "All industrial" is the default view. Only buildings standing today are shown: demolished buildings are not in the data, so older decades look smaller than they were. Freight rail: BTS National Transportation Atlas Database. Lake Michigan shoreline © OpenStreetMap contributors.
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Frequently asked questions
Where does the data come from?
From the Cook County Assessor's public commercial valuation data, which records the year built and floor area of every industrial property, joined to parcel locations. Warehouse sites are cross-checked with CMAP's Land Use Inventory.
Why do the early decades look so small?
The map shows only buildings standing today. Most industrial buildings from the 1800s and early 1900s have been demolished or redeveloped, so they are missing from current assessor records.
What counts as a warehouse?
A property whose assessor record lists a warehouse or distribution use, or one located on a warehouse and distribution site of 100,000 sq ft or more in CMAP's Land Use Inventory. Everything else is shown as other industrial.
Why only Cook County?
Cook County publishes year built and floor area for industrial properties as open data. Neighboring counties do not publish these fields yet; we will add them as the data becomes available.
Can I use this kind of data in my own product?
Yes. Placematic provides geocoding, drive-time catchments and truck routing APIs for logistics and real estate platforms. The free tier includes 10,000 requests a month.
