Overview

The City of Pittsburgh’s Permits, Licenses, and Inspections (PLI) Department regulates construction in Pittsburgh. This dataset contains records of permits issued by PLI from 2019-06-01 until the present. Permit records dating back to 2012 may be found in this historical datasets of PLI permits.

Motivation

These permit records are used to manage permitting data by City employees and can be used to understand when permits are issued, the nature of the work, where work is occurring, and the dollar value of the project.

Collection

The permit records in this dataset are drawn from the Computronix (CX) system which is used to manage these permits.

There are four general classes of permits that are present in these data (building permits, mechanical permits, electrical permits, and “general” permits). Building permits pertain to new construction or construction updates to existing properties. Mechanical permits are obtained for installation or alterations to systems in a building such as HVAC, gas systems, boilers, etc. Electrical permits are required for new work or upgrades to electrical systems such as electrical panels, generators, or wiring. "General permits" is a miscellaneous class that contains the following permit types:

• LAND OPERATIONS PERMIT
• SIGN PERMIT
• OCCUPANT LOAD PLACARD PERMIT
• OCCUPANCY ONLY PERMIT
• SUPPRESSION SYSTEM PERMIT
• FIRE ALARM PERMIT
• DEMOLITION PERMIT
• STORM WATER PERMIT
• FLOOD PLAIN PERMIT
• PLAN REVIEW MEETING

More documentation on PLI permits can be found at https://pittsburghpa.gov/pli/pli-permits.

Mechanical, electrical, and building permits are far more prevalent in the dataset because general permits are divided into 10 sub-types.

The field ext_file_num represents the only UUID for each permit record.

Pre-processing

All string text (most fields) were converted to UPPERCASE data. The data are manually entered and often contain non-uniform formatting. While several solutions for cleaning the data exist, including allowing the user to clean the data after accessing it here, text were transformed to UPPERCASE to ensure the data were uniformly formatted in this case. Future improvements to this ETL pipeline may approach this problem with a more sophisticated technique.

We've redacted owner names for permits where the property appears to be currently owner-occupied.

Known Limitations/Biases

Plumbing permits are not included in this dataset, because the Allegheny County Health Department Plumbing Division is responsible for all plumbing permits in the City of Pittsburgh.