How Injustice Watch Uses Geocodio in Their Reporting

Standardizing Messy Address Data in Chicago

Injustice Watch, a nonprofit newsroom investigating the Cook County (Chicago) courts system, used Geocodio to clean up 2.3M messy, incomplete, and misspelled address records in their "Tenant Trap" investigation. Their investigation found that thousands of lower-income renters in Chicago are trapped in unsafe buildings.

They wrote a behind-the-scenes article about how they cleaned up the addresses and how Geocodio helped:

"To examine the link between dangerous building disrepair and evictions in Chicago, Injustice Watch analyzed roughly 1.9 million code violations, 60,000 administrative court dockets, 300,000 eviction court dockets, and 43,000 housing court dockets dating back to the early 2000s.

Because Chicago Property Index Numbers were absent from these records, Injustice Watch relied on street addresses to conduct its initial analyses. Building violations and administrative hearings clearly identify the offending address, while location information from eviction records is based on the defendant’s address in each case.

For eviction filings, this creates a few issues. Addresses transcribed from court paperwork into a computer system are far from flawless. They can be rife with misspellings and omissions, and many filings don’t even list apartment numbers. To correctly link these thousands of Chicago evictions with their buildings’ respective inspection histories, as well as legal sanctions against the property owners, the addresses present had to offer a near-perfect match.

To do this, Injustice Watch enlisted the help of an online platform called Geocodio to repair the many valid addresses with problems and bring them all under a standard format. This process also identified eviction filings with addresses too erroneous to be included in any analysis."

You can read the investigation here, and more about their methodology here.

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