City-owned land: where the City holds vacant lots
The City of Chicago owns tens of thousands of vacant and surplus parcels — the physical legacy of decades of disinvestment, concentrated on the South and West Sides. Citywide the City holds about 15 parcels per 1,000, but the range is enormous: from a handful in stable neighborhoods to nearly 190 per 1,000 in South Deering. About half of that land is currently on the market. Search your address or click any community area, and switch between how much the City owns and how much is for sale.
How to read this map
City-owned land is the number of parcels the City currently owns in a community area, per 1,000 parcels. It counts land the City holds outright or leases out; parcels the City has already sold are excluded. The ramp is warmbecause a heavy concentration of vacant city-held land is a burden signal — but the same parcels are an opportunity, which is why the drawer links to the City’s own application to buy.
Share on the marketis, of a community area’s city-owned parcels, the share currently available to acquire — offered for sale or open for an expression of interest. It reads the inventory’s sales_statusfield (there is a second, much sparser status column that would understate every neighborhood; we don’t use it). Areas with fewer than ten city-owned parcels are suppressed on this view. Open application windows and deadlines are shown as of the data’s last refresh.
Each record carries a real Cook County PIN, so we join it straight to the parcel — no geocoding — and about 98%of currently-owned parcels match. Land area is the City’s own square-footage estimate and is only populated for some parcels, so the drawer reports how many it covers.
Looking to buy? The City runs ChiBlockBuilder for residential city-owned land. Source: City of Chicago City-Owned Land Inventory. See methodology for the PIN join, the status definitions, and coverage.