The Steans Family Foundation (SFF) dedicates time, resources, and skills within the North Lawndale community, located on Chicago’s west side. SFF believes effective revitalization can occur within the existing social, educational, and economic networks that create and sustain communities. SFF believes that with investment, coupled with a strong policy ecosystem, communities can thrive.

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With the bankruptcy of one of the largest landlords in Chicago, 800 properties are now available for sale across the City’s West and South Sides, including a number of properties in North Lawndale. Dubbed as “One of the largest land acquisition opportunities in Chicago’s recent history”, many parties across the city see it as a “prime opportunity to capitalize on revitalization efforts to contribute to vibrant, evolving communities”.

The Steans Family Foundation (SFF) sees it as an opportunity to launch our housing efforts in this vein, hoping to identify clusters of properties to potentially put together 20 plus properties in our violence hotspots quickly for housing development. To aid in this goal, I have looked at which bankrupt properties offered by Hilco Real Estate are in North Lawndale and mapped it alongside available Land Bank and City of Chicago properties to see if we can combine those properties with the higher priority properties to have a block-by-block strategy where we may be able to find four blocks together where we would potentially start and then expand from there.

To this end, I have provided an interactive map below for you to use to explore possibilities and come to your own conclusions.

Bankrupt Parcels for Acquisition Map

The above map was created for the purpose of identifying all contiguous vacant parcels (city owned, county owned, bankrupt properites) in North Lawndale that could potentially be bundled and acquired to host potential development projects.

This map has three layers, one containing the individual parcels currently owned by either the City of Chicago, Cook County, or Bankrupt Properties for Sale, and an accompanying layer which merges and aggregates any lots that touch and are contiguous providing area measures in acres, and a top layer of only the bankrupt properties available for acquisition to compare ot the other two layers.

Three map Layers:

  • All available Parcels
    • Underlying Parcels from ChiBlock Builder, Cook County Land Bank, Hilco Real Estate’s listings of available bankrupt properties with underlying Address,ownership type, and other information.
  • Merged Parcels
    • Layer of above individual parcels merged if they were touching. Provides area in acres of merged parcels to help identify large groupings of publicly owned city parcels for development.
  • Bankrupt Parcels
    • Hilco Real Estate’s listings of available bankrupt properties

Updated:

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