CAEE Seminar – Segmenting Multifamily Housing in Chicago to Improve Energy Efficiency

Prof. Paul Anderson, Prof. Jamshid Mohammadi , and Prof. Brent Stephens of the Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering department will be hosting a seminar featuring Margaret Garascia, Senior Research Analyst and Delmar Gillus, Chief Operating Officer of Elevate Energy. The topic of the seminar will be Segmenting Multifamily Housing in Chicago to Improve Energy Efficiency.

A data-driven description of a community’s housing stock can help identify community needs and inform decision-making regarding energy efficiency and other types of programs. Elevate Energy will present an overview of our energy efficiency, renewable energy, and energy planning programs in Chicago and beyond. We will discuss a specific research project in which we segmented Chicago’s multifamily buildings by age, size, construction type, and energy use. Conducting this analysis presented several thorny data challenges: building-level data are not collected in any central location; in Chicago and many other cities, the local property assessor has the most complete data of this kind, but the data are compiled for the purpose of tax assessment and not for the purpose of population-level building segmentation; and many disparate data sets must be combined with assessor data into a cohesive whole, presenting difficulty in matching, cleaning, and determining the appropriate level of granularity. Identifying and locating geographic concentrations of certain building types enable more precise targeting for energy, housing, and other building programs.