Methodology & data
Every figure on BuildingCensus traces to a city government's official building-energy-benchmarking disclosure. Nothing is modeled, estimated or scraped from third parties.
Sources
The six live disclosures
| City | Law / program | Buildings | Portal |
|---|---|---|---|
| New York City, NY | Local Law 84 (LL84) | 48,310 | source → |
| Chicago, IL | Chicago Energy Benchmarking Ordinance | 3,852 | source → |
| Seattle, WA | Seattle Energy Benchmarking Ordinance (SMC 22.920) | 3,823 | source → |
| Los Angeles, CA | LA Municipal Code 22.610.1 (EBEWE) | 13,994 | source → |
| Cambridge, MA | BEUDO | 902 | source → |
| San Francisco, CA | SF Environment Code Chapter 20 | 2 | source → |
In the queue: Boston, Washington, DC, Denver, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Montgomery County, MD, Minneapolis, Portland, OR — and the remaining ~40 US jurisdictions with benchmarking or building-performance laws as they publish usable data.
Identity
How a building is keyed
Cities publish one row per building per reporting year — 300,797building-year records across the corpus. BuildingCensus keys each building by its city's own building identifier (BBL-derived IDs in New York, OSE building IDs in Seattle, parcel numbers in San Francisco, and so on). The latest reporting year is canonical— it drives the page's grade, stats and metadata — and every earlier year renders in the year-over-year table.
Profile URLs end in a stable 8-character fingerprint of that city-plus-building key, so a page's address never changes when a new disclosure year lands.
Honest data
Per-source caveats
- New York City: The source lists the borough, not the city, in its own city field — BuildingCensus normalizes every record to New York City.
- Chicago: Chicago reports electricity and gas only as kBtu totals; kWh and therm figures are unit conversions, not source-reported values.
- Seattle: Seattle's dataset reports no water-use field.
- Los Angeles: The LA source publishes no building names and no coordinates — pages are addressed by street address, and LA buildings do not appear on maps.
- Los Angeles: LA reports EUI and emissions only (no electricity/gas breakout).
- Cambridge: The Cambridge source publishes no building names — pages are addressed by street address.
- Cambridge: No per-square-foot GHG intensity in the source (total emissions only).
- San Francisco: SF classifies buildings into four broad categories rather than EPA property types.
- San Francisco: Gas figures are kBtu-converted; no water-use field.
- Columns a source doesn't report are left empty — we never fabricate a value to fill a table.
Quality
The completeness gate
Buildings that report neither an ENERGY STAR score nor a site energy-use intensity, or that are under 10,000 sq ft, still get a page (the record is public either way) but are marked noindex and excluded from sitemaps. Search engines and answer engines only see buildings with real performance data.
ENERGY STAR letter bands (A 85–100 / B 70–84 / C 55–69 / D 1–54) follow New York City's LL33 grade cutoffs and are applied uniformly across cities for comparability. They are BuildingCensus presentation, not an official rating outside NYC.
Use
Licensing & attribution
The underlying disclosures are public records published by each city. BuildingCensus's unification, grading, cross-links and history views may be cited with attribution to BuildingCensus (buildingcensus.com). For bulk or API access, contact kenny@hyder.me.
Dataset updated . Freshness reflects the most recent source re-ingest.