Vacant & abandoned buildings
Where do residents report vacant and abandoned buildings? This maps 311 vacant-building complaints over the trailing year, per 1,000 parcels — a current read on building-level blight. The concentration is unmistakable and long-standing: the far South Side, from West Pullman and Roseland through Englewood, carries several times the citywide rate. Search your address or click any community area.
How to read this map
Each value is the number of 311 vacant/abandoned-building complaints placed in a community area over the trailing window, divided by its parcels and scaled to 1,000. The ramp is warmand higher is worse — a dense cluster of complaints is a blight-and-disinvestment signal, not a neutral magnitude. Complaints are assigned by the City’s own community-area field on each request.
A note on sources. The City also publishes a vacant-buildings violations dataset, but it is effectively a historical archive — its enforcement activity peaked in 2011–2017, the wave of the foreclosure crisis, and it has recorded only a handful of cases since. To avoid implying that decade-old enforcement is current, this map uses the live 311 complaint stream instead; the historical violations remain a matter of record but are not shown here.
Source: City of Chicago 311 service requests. See methodology for the window and the historical-violations note.