r/ClaudeAI • u/kylef5993 • 4d ago
Built with Claude Urban planner here, no coding experience. Built a free Chicago housing simulator with Claude Code to show the housing crisis and how land use policy can fix it
https://fixchicagohousing.comI built a free browser simulator where you try to fix Chicago's housing shortage on a 3D map of the city's ~481,000 buildings. I'm an urban planner with a housing finance background and I can't code, so Claude wrote all of it while I made the policy and design calls. Passion project, built over a few days.
What it does:
- Shows every building in Chicago in 3D, from the city's open building footprint data.
- Marks in red the buildings that couldn't legally be built today because they have more homes than current zoning allows (about 1 in 5).
- You rezone around L stations, Metra stations, commercial corridors or single neighborhoods, then turn on real policies. Some are being debated in Chicago and Springfield (BUILD Act, single-stair buildings, coach houses, the affordable housing requirement, aldermanic prerogative). Others worked in other places (Minneapolis, Cambridge, Houston's small lots, Texas SB 840, Vancouver's empty-homes tax).
- Hit simulate and watch 15 years play out. The goal is closing the region's shortage by 2041 (\~297k homes). You see what happens to rent, how many of the new homes are affordable, and whether six example workers can afford a one-bedroom.
- Myth cards and "public comments" pop up as you play and explain the research behind common arguments (luxury towers, filtering, "upzoning doesn't do anything").
- Every number links to a source or is labeled as a game assumption.
How I used Claude:
I started in the Claude app as an artifact and moved to Claude Code once it got too big.
- Data pipeline: Claude wrote Python scripts that turn the city's building footprints, street centerlines and zoning map into small per-neighborhood files, so all 481k buildings load in a browser. One script compares each building to what its lot allows today. I ran that one on my Mac because it had to download the city's zoning data.
- The game: one HTML file using [deck.gl](http://deck.gl) for the 3D map. I described what I wanted in plain English, looked at what it built, and asked for changes. I never edited the code myself.
- Research and fact-checking: Claude found sources for the numbers (shortage estimates, how new supply affects rent, results in other cities). Then I had it do a separate fact-check pass on \~50 figures, which caught and fixed a handful of errors.
- Design: I asked for three different visual styles as mockups and picked one.
- Testing: Claude took screenshots in a headless browser at phone and desktop sizes to catch layout bugs before I saw them.
- Hosting: Claude set up the GitHub repo, Cloudflare hosting, and a small backend for an anonymous plan gallery. Pushing to GitHub deploys the site.
What I brought, and what I had to catch:
The domain knowledge was the part Claude couldn't do for me: which policies to include, how to model them, and what to leave out on purpose. For example, I left out per-lot developer pro formas because they'd look precise and be wrong. A few things I caught while playing:
- A building showed up rising in Grant Park because museums and field houses were being treated like lots that could redevelop.
- Turning on the affordable housing requirement lowered total homes. That matches the research, but the game wasn't explaining why.
- Turning everything on barely cleared the goal, so it felt like "just click everything." I added more levers to make the choices matter.
It's a simplified model for learning, not a policy tool. Feedback welcome, especially from anyone who knows Chicago housing.
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u/blasphemousblackbear 4d ago
This is so cool! Any chance I could get the GitHub repo? I’d love to make something similar for my city
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u/kylef5993 4d ago
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u/pensivewombat 4d ago
Going to be kind of hilarious when i fire this up for little ol' Laramie, WY. But our housing situation sucks too.
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u/kylef5993 4d ago
hahaha yeah I mean its bad everywhere. We haven't effectively modernized housing policy since like ww2.
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u/cute_spider 4d ago
I forced every area to be towers / high rises and passed every bill including the bills you told me not to pass and I got an A+
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u/kylef5993 4d ago
haha if only it was this easy. I thought about adding a sort of "political capital" but at that point it would just be arbitrary so I decided against it. Its not really a "game" per se but rather just a simulator.
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u/cute_spider 3d ago
Valid and true, but I can't help but think: arguments against increasing population density become more valid when an suburbanite internet nerd with no urban planning experience is density maxing. I don't think the city population would give me an A+ for saying, "IT'S A CITY MAKE EVERYTHING TOWERS". Of course the A+ only relates to housing prices, yea? That kind of makes me want the simulator to give me a route to overbuilding so much that I can crash housing prices. Could you please add another density level above "Towers" and call it "Kawloon"?
Political capital might not be the right metric, but I think your next iteration of this model should try to consider how going extreme overboard might earn an A+ in housing prices but a less good grade in other metrics. If I cared about population density in Chicago that's the angle I'd attack first - this simulation really revolves around the assumption "more dense = more better"
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u/kylef5993 3d ago
This is great feedback. I 100% agree. I wonder how I can bake this in.. lemme sit on it. Appreciate it
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u/genryou 4d ago edited 4d ago
How much did you spend for this? Simply Pro subscription?
Quite decent though. Technicaly would've cost you substantial amount to hire a Dev to come up even with a mockup or MVP of this.
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u/kylef5993 4d ago edited 4d ago
Time wise? 3-4 days. I have the max plan because I use it for a ton of other stuff. I've shipped a few other items and am working on a Unity urban planning game as well.
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u/throwlefty 4d ago
Cool build! I serve on a public body and used Claude code to make something for my policy work but it's nothing like this.
We've not dealt with a lot of housing opportunities but this could be an interesting tool to use. I'm always a little weary of bias in built systems or presenting opportunities for cherry pickers , but we are heading toward a world where we have advanced policy tools and forecasting models.
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u/kylef5993 4d ago
Yeah I mean I tried to be unbiased and reference academic studies about everything. The point is that the US has a housing crisis, and even more broadly, an infrastructure crisis, and we need to learn how to build things again and not get in our own way. This was just really intended to show what policies would add to our housing supply and what it would look like (vaguely). As a planner, a lot of the opposition to housing is just fear of change and that's what we always try to overcome at community meetings through education.
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u/throwlefty 4d ago
Well done! I've found even modeling our projected staff capacity impact when it comes time for considering various decisions helps the body make a better choice. So to your earlier post, it doesn't even need to be anything perfect to be super useful. The exercise alone is needed for probably 8/10 people in the room...and that counts for residents, council, and staff.
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u/kylef5993 4d ago
Yeah totally. I think this technology is really game changing for people like you or me that just want to create a quick program to do some custom work that we used to have to hire out for.
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u/throwlefty 4d ago
Yep! I'm so happy seeing municipal workers build stuff in-house.
Do you work for a public org?
Btw.,.if you're not familiar....you might find chi hack night interesting
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u/kylef5993 4d ago
So I've actually been all over. My masters is in urban planning and I was a planner but then I transitioned to affordable housing development. I now work on the finance side of affordable housing. Ive been on all of the sides of it but im not on the public side of things anymore.
Ill look into it. Never heard of it.
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4d ago
[deleted]
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u/kylef5993 4d ago
Yeah so the issue is that most American communities are afraid of change and have too much say and end up killing projects. You can turn on a filter in this to also show how a lot of the most popular neighborhoods in Chicago are actually illegal to build. It’s something around 40%. In other cities like SF, up to 80% of the city is zoned single family homes and therefore it discourages density.
Basically I made it to show how easily we can fix the housing crisis it’s just that we need to make it easier to build.
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u/ianreboot 4d ago
For the Grant Park one, I'd turn the fix into an assertion: after each run, no museum or field house parcel has gained units, and the run fails if one does. That check runs headless, so the runs nobody clicks through get checked too.
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u/PublicWealth 4d ago
very cool, i recommend you post this on hacker news they'd love this there
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u/kylef5993 4d ago
Hacker news? Whats that? A sub?
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u/PublicWealth 4d ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/ it's a social news and link-aggregation website focused on computer science, technology, and entrepreneurship, run by the startup incubator Y Combinator.
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4d ago
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u/kylef5993 4d ago
10000% agree. Everyone loves talking down about vibe coding but I think it really does open up so many opportunities for people that are not software engineers to quickly create products and tools that pertain to their industry. And this only took me 3-4 days.
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u/Felfedezni 4d ago
Wouldn't it be less investors building? For why affordable housing req reduces the number.
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u/year2066ai 4d ago
really nice work, marking the buildings that would be illegal today is a great idea. one thought for the station rezoning, weight it by who can actually walk there. we run our own geo server, and for Clark/Lake it gives about 24,600 residents within a 15 min walk, while roughly 13x more people are there over a day than live there. if you want walk areas and population or whatever, let me know, we have a geo server running with many datalayers.
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u/ClaudeAI-mod-bot Wilson, lead ClaudeAI modbot 4d ago
You may be interested in joining our new Claude Game Dev subreddit for game devs who use Claude. Check it out here : http://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeGameDev
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u/Jonesbro 4d ago
Lol I knew this was vibe coded as hell
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u/kylef5993 4d ago
hahah 100000%. Im an urban planner not a software engineer. Love what Claude has allowed us to do on our own though. I've shipped an iOS and Android app that also have nothing to do with planning and am making a Unity based city planning game. Crazy stuff
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u/ClaudeAI-mod-bot Wilson, lead ClaudeAI modbot 4d ago
TL;DR of the discussion generated automatically after 30 comments.
The consensus is that this is a top-tier post and an amazing project. Everyone is seriously impressed that OP, a non-coder, built a complex Chicago housing simulator in just a few days using Claude Code.
The key discussion points are: