East Garfield Park is one of only two of Chicago’s 77 community areas — New City is the other — where four of the five market indicators in our gentrification-signals analysis are flashing at once: sale prices, two-to-six-flat prices, building permits and new business licenses have all risen sharply between that analysis’s before-and-after windows. This page gathers everything our analyses have measured about the area — homes, building, lending, city services, transit — each figure linked to the analysis that computed it. What the numbers mean for the people living there is not a question data can settle, and this page does not try.
Every figure comes from the source files of our earlier analyses · assembled July 30, 2026What homes sell for
The area’s housing stock trades mostly as two-to-six-flats, not houses: 66 flat sales in 2025 against 27 house sales. The flats median went from $199,000 in 2019 to $372,500 in 2025 (87 percent higher); the house median from $168,500 to $295,000 (75 percent) — though the house figure rests on just 27 sales in 2025, a modest base that can move with a handful of transactions. Both medians remain below the citywide 2025 house median of $320,000.
The screens behind these medians — only arm’s-length deeds, meaning ordinary sales between unrelated parties, mapped to community areas: What a Chicago Home Actually Sold For: 241,653 Deeds, All 77 Community Areas, 2018–2026
What the signals analysis found
Our five-indicator screen scores every community area on prices, flats, corporate buying, permits and licenses. East Garfield Park trips four of the five — corporate buying is the one it does not: the corporate share of purchases there moved little. The full method, and why a signal is a measurement rather than a verdict: Where Chicago’s Gentrification Signals Are Flashing: Five Market Indicators, All 77 Community Areas
What gets built, opened and financed
The city issued 20 new-construction permits in the area in the first half of 2025 and 24 in the first half of 2026 — and our signals analysis, which combines two years at a time, counted permits rising from 17 across 2018–19 to 64 across 2024–25. New business licenses went from 53 in 2019 to 66 in 2025 — a rise, in the same years our citywide count found Chicago licensing a thousand fewer new businesses a year than before the pandemic. On the lending side, federal mortgage records show 99 home-purchase loans in the area in 2025 against 107 recorded sales, 17 of the loans flagged in the records as not for owner occupancy.
The citywide licensing decline this area runs against: Chicago Licenses 1,000 Fewer New Businesses a Year Than Before the Pandemic. The Gap Is Downtown.
The lending records and their limits — loans and sales are separate systems, not matched pairs: 1,424 Chicago Homes Sold for Under $100,000 Last Year. Lenders Wrote 289 Mortgages That Size.
City services, on the clock
From our timing of 793,774 closed 311 requests — created January 2024 through June 2026 — graffiti requests in East Garfield Park typically closed the same day they were filed — a median of 0.0 days across 1,239 requests, against 0.7 citywide. Streetlight-outage requests took 2.8 days at the median against 2.5 citywide; abandoned-vehicle requests 9.8 days against 11.6 citywide. A closed request is the record’s word, not a verified repair.
Every type, every area, with the method: Chicago on the Clock: We Timed 793,774 Service Requests, Neighborhood by Neighborhood
The subsidized stock and the one L stop
The city’s affordable-rental inventory lists 14 developments and 1,205 units in East Garfield Park — the sixth-most listed units of the 77 community areas. The inventory is a courtesy list, last updated December 30, 2024, and partial by its own description. The area’s one L station, Conservatory on the Green Line, averaged 815 weekday entries in January–May 2019 and 512 in the same window of 2026 — 63 percent of its pre-pandemic weekday traffic — close to the systemwide figure, in a system where only two stations have returned to 2019 levels.
Our count of that inventory — its boundaries, and the state law that takes rent control off the table in Chicago: New York City’s Rent Board Set 2026-27 Stabilized Increases at Zero. Illinois Law Bars Chicago From Controlling Private Rents.
Every station against its 2019 self: Only Two L Stations Are Busier Than Before the Pandemic. Neither Is Downtown.
How this profile works
No new data was fetched for this page: every figure is read from the source files of the analyses linked above, each of which documents its own methods, windows and caveats. Small bases are flagged where they occur. And a standing rule for neighborhood pages: we report what the records show and take no position on where anyone should live — the records cannot answer that, and we do not pretend they can. If you spot an error, corrections come first.