Redeveloping 900 vacant lots
There are many questions that can be answered and stories to explore each time we update the Cook County property data (which is done annually, as explained last week). For example, “How many two-flats were lost?”
The answer? From 2017 to 2018, there was a decrease of approximately 1,346 two-flats in all of Cook County. It’s possible some were demolished, deconverted to single-family houses, or burned down, while others may have gotten a third unit to become a three-flat.
Transforming vacant land
The question that I wanted to answer was how many vacant lots were redeveloped in Chicago. I looked through Chicago Cityscape’s huge Cook County property database for Chicago properties that the Cook County Assessor had classified as vacant in 2017 but not vacant in 2018. That query resulted in about 984 vacant parcels that had been redeveloped between 2017 and 2018. (It’s likely a little less than that because of errors in the data, and many parcels are combined in a single redevelopment project.)
The most common transformation patterns, by land area, were redeveloping vacant lots into industrial buildings, one-story commercial buildings, and apartment buildings with more than seven units.
By parcel count, though, the plurality of vacant lots — about 154 of them — were developed into single-family houses. Hotspots were in Washington Heights, McKinley Park and Bridgeport, and Forest Glen.
Let’s tour some vacant lot redevelopments
A brief glance at the map shows a lot of redevelopment in the West Loop and Fulton Market area between 2017 and 2018. An analysis of earlier years, starting around 2012, would probably show many more former vacant lots.
Given that many parcels weren’t always vacant and buildings have been torn down, a parcel might show as improved one year, vacant after the building’s demolition in the second year, and then shown as improved the third year when the new building was erected. That was surely the case for a large group of redeveloped vacant parcels which appeared at the corner at Randolph and Carpenter Streets — the McDonald’s headquarters opened here last year on the former site of Harpo Studios, where Oprah Winfrey’s TV show was filmed.
A block north of the McDonald’s headquarters, Medici Living Group of Germany opened a Quarters-branded co-living residential building at 171 N Aberdeen St. It was a parking lot prior.
Southwest of there, at Racine and Jackson, the former Union Park tavern was demolished in 2016, after which a 20-unit building called Residences on Racine started rising; it opened in 2018.
Heading outside downtown, we come across a redevelopment in Bronzeville. The former John B. Drake Elementary School (which is the same person who founded a plat subdivision in East Garfield Park, and was the father to the Drake hotel founder) was closed by Chicago Public Schools in 2013 and sold to the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) union local 134. Part of the school was demolished and an addition was built on the remaining building.
Sometimes the data guiding this tour is imperfect. This large vacant lot in Washington Park had been reclassified from “Vacant Land” in 2017 to “Minor Improvement on Vacant Land” in 2018 — yet no improvement had taken place. The Google Street View image from May 2019 shows only a pile of tires at the base of a small tree.
Heading due east from here, we come across Solstice on the Park, a Hyde Park high-rise. Like all of the others, the parcel was classified as “Vacant Land” in 2017, yet in 2018 it was reclassified as “Apartment building over three stories, seven or more units”. Indeed, it has 250 apartments!
Sidebar: A vacant lot is still assessed for its value, and owners still pay taxes. In 2017, when the Solstice on the Park land was still “vacant”, the owners paid $26,190 in property taxes. In 2018 they paid $378,513. That tax bill includes the assessment of the building’s parking garage to the north.
Before it was vacant, it was classified as a “Special rental structure” (it was a surface and underground parking lot) and the owners paid $73,444 in property taxes.
The last stop on this redevelopment tour is at a parcel in Pullman that was vacant in 2017 and a “One story commercial building” that opened in 2018. The new strip mall was developed by Chicago Neighborhood Initiatives (CNI). It was in the news earlier this year for (1) opening a small food hall called “One Eleven” that hosts local restaurant entrepreneurs on a rotating, and (2) where Blue Cross Blue Shield opened its first “Blue Door Neighborhood Center” that’s a community health education center open to everyone, no matter their health insurance status or provider.
To explore this data, purchase a data dump from the Chicago Cityscape Maps & Data Store, or become an Enterprise member to access to our API. Everyone can look up information one parcel at a time using Address Snapshot.
