Track Mt. Airy Construction with New Website

Finding out about construction projects in the Northwest just got a little bit easier.

PlanPhilly, a website that reports on the city's planning and zoning, has teamed up with web development company Azavea to produce Licsense to Inspect, a website that basially gives you a rundown of what a construction property has been approved for from the city's department of License and Inspections.

PlanPhilly said of its new website that "it makes it easy to monitor construction, demolition and code violations in targeted areas of the city" and that "enables users … to search, display, sort and save data collected by [L&I]."

In other words: if you want to know what all the banging around next door is about, this is a good place to start.

After playing around with the website a bit (which you can do here), I can say objectively that it is a pretty useful tool, especially in the construction-heavy Northwest. Here are some stats I was able to pull just after a few minutes of mousing around:

• 2 businesses in Mt. Airy have licenses for hazardous materia but both licenses have expired.

• 4 properties have been licensed for new construction permits, including a permit to change the roofing on eight single-family units at 7131 Devon Street.

• According to the website, no properties in the 22nd Ward are licensed as "vacant commercial," but I'm a little suspect of that one.

Play around with the site here. See what Plan Philly has to say about its new baby here.