ChiBlockBuilder’s next round closes on Friday, 11/15

Larger lots, to be sold at market rate, have a later deadline

The next round of city-owned vacant lots for sale ends this week, on Friday, November 15. The following round ends on January 3. Use Chicago Cityscape to find the best lots to apply for.

The Nov. 15th round includes 331 properties available for sale sorted into six property sales programs (affordable housing, market rate, missing middle, open space, side yard, and urban agriculture). The Jan. 3rd round includes 20 properties in the “market rate” property sales programs.

Use Chicago Cityscape to find the best lots

Chicago Cityscape members can use Property Finder — open the citywide Property Finder — to use their regular search parameters alongside the ChiBlockBuilder filter to find available vacant lots that fit the size, zoning, location, and available incentives filters.

Tip: Our new help center & knowledge base has a tutorial on how to find ChiBlockBuilder properties within Chicago Cityscape and pair with additional filters.

What’s for sale?

New this year in the ChiBlockBuilder are some very large lots and a new “missing middle infill housing” initiative, which we’re highlighting here:

• 20-06-400-008-0000 is a massive, eight-acre lot in New City. Its zoning district doesn’t allow housing, but use Chicago Cityscape’s Zoning Assessment to learn what uses and developments are permitted. The city’s planning department is recommending that proposals include light manufacturing, warehousing, and retail.
• 11-30-405-001-0000 and 11-30-405-009-0000 are two large parcels, intended to be sold together, next to the Howard CTA station in Rogers Park. The parcels are well-zoned, B3-5, which allows a lot of housing. Use our Super Parcel feature to get an estimate of how many homes are allowed here, but note that the city’s planning department is looking for a proposal that includes a minimum number of cooperatively-owned homes. Applications are due Jan. 3, 2025.

• In North Lawndale, the city is selling clusters of vacant lots for development as one to six-unit houses (applicants commit to acquiring all of the lots in a given cluster). This is a special initiative to spur for-sale missing middle housing, and the city is offering grants of up to $150,000 per unit to cover development financing gaps. Coinciding with this, the city is imploring winning applicants to use one of the winning designs resulting from the “Come Home Chicago” competition in 2023.

Once you identify a lot you’d like to acquire or develop, apply to acquire a property on the city’s ChiBlockBuilder website.

ChiBlockBuilder’s next round closes in mid-November was originally published in Chicago Cityscape’s Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.