The dataset described in this article, and made available as an accompanying spreadsheet, was used in the study entitled, "Neighborhood diversity and the creative class in Chicago," to assess the spatial associations between neighborhood diversity and the creative class at the neighborhood (i.e., census tract) scale in Chicago [1]. In this study, we found a significant positive association between the creative class and the proportion of gay households and income diversity, but not racial or linguistic diversity. However, a geographically-weighted regression (GWR) analysis demonstrated substantial spatial nonstationarity among these relationships. This article describes the creative class, diversity, and control variables, their sources, and the methods used to calculate them. *Correspondence to: Department of Geography/Geology, University of Nebraska at Omaha, 6001 Dodge Street, Durham Science Center 263, Omaha, NE 68182, USA.