After the Wrecking Ball: A Rebuild Permit Follows at 84 Percent of Logan Square’s Demolished Sites, and at None of West Pullman’s 137
Chicago issued wrecking permits at 4,482 sites in 2018-2022. We matched every one against the city's new-construction permits by parcel number and address: 42.8 percent show a rebuild permit. Logan Square, 187 of 222. West Englewood, 1 of 287. West Pullman, 0 of 137. Where a rebuild comes, the median gap is 50 days.
Between 2018 and 2022, Chicago issued wrecking permits at 4,482 distinct sites. What happened next depends almost entirely on where the site stands. We matched every one of those sites against the city’s new-construction permits, by parcel number and by address, and found a rebuild permit at 1,916 of them — 42.8 percent. In Logan Square, 187 of 222 demolition sites show one. In West Englewood, 1 of 287 does. In West Pullman, none of 137 do. Two very different things wear the same name in the permit file: on the North Side, demolition is mostly the first step of construction; on much of the South and West sides, no construction follows in the record. These rates are conservative estimates — the matching is built so that missing a real rebuild is far more likely than inventing one — and we report what the records show, taking no position on where anyone should live.
Two demolitions, two fates
The split is not a gradient; it is a cliff. Eight community areas — West Pullman, West Englewood, Roseland, Greater Grand Crossing, Englewood, South Chicago, West Garfield Park, and Auburn Gresham — together account for more than a thousand demolition sites and, among them, fewer than fifteen matched rebuild permits. At the other end, six North and Northwest side areas each cleared 80 percent. The pattern echoes what our West Englewood profile found from the other direction: a nearly empty new-construction permit record, next to one of the citywide-fastest price rises. What stands on those sites today, the permit file cannot say; what it can say is that construction was almost never permitted on them.
When the rebuild comes, it comes fast
Among sites that do rebuild, the timeline is short. 516 of the 1,916 matched sites had their new-construction permit in hand before the wrecking permit — developer projects staged in the usual order, build permit first. Among the 1,400 where the construction permit came after the demolition, the median gap was just 50 days, and three-quarters were under 204 days. Only 91 sites took more than three years. Rebuilding, where it happens, is mostly one continuous project. What the file does not show, within the record so far, is a reservoir of demolished sites slowly filling in years later — though the latest 2022 demolitions have had the least time to do so, and later permits would raise these rates.
The map
Meanwhile, demolition itself is slowing
The city issued 1,446 demolition permits in 2006 and 661 in 2025 — a long slide with a floor around 615 to 660 a year since 2023. Our two-to-six-flat analysis found the city’s small apartment buildings disappearing through both demolition and deconversion; this file shows the demolition half of that pipeline running at less than half its mid-2000s pace. Fewer teardowns, but the ones that happen still sort sharply by geography.
How we counted
Source: City of Chicago Building Permits (ydr8-5enu), pulled August 3, 2026. Cohort: all 4,636 wrecking/demolition permits issued 2018 through 2022, collapsed to 4,482 unique sites by parcel number (multiple wreck permits at one parcel — front and rear buildings, phased work — count once, keeping the earliest date).
The match: a site counts as rebuilding if any new-construction permit (2017 to present) shares a parcel PIN with it or matches its normalized street address exactly, with an issue date no earlier than 365 days before the demolition permit. That look-back window exists because developers often pull the construction permit first; matches that predate the demolition by more than a year are not counted. 516 matched sites had the construction permit before the wrecking permit under this rule.
Why these undercount: about a third of new-construction permits carry no parcel number, and address matching misses street-number ranges and corner lots with two frontages. A missed match makes a rebuilt site look unrebuilt; the reverse error is far less likely, though parcel renumbering or address quirks could in principle produce a false match. Read each rate as a conservative estimate, more likely to understate rebuilding than overstate it.
The floor on areas: community areas with fewer than 30 demolition sites in the cohort (37 of them) are unranked and gray on the map.
What this is not: a permit is not a completed building — a matched site means construction was permitted, not that it finished. The file also does not say who demolished a building or why, and a demolition permit is not a record of abandonment: teardowns for luxury construction and emergency demolitions of failing buildings look identical here.
Computed by KCM Desk from records current to August 3, 2026; published August 3, 2026. If you spot an error, corrections come first.
