Chicago’s government owns 12,110 parcels of land, according to the inventory it publishes and updates daily. The file records where they sit, and the answer is concentrated: Englewood alone holds 1,312 city-owned parcels and West Englewood 992 — together 20 percent of the city-owned parcels that carry a community-area name. The same file logs the parcels it marks Sold, and between its two complete post-expansion years the count fell by a quarter: 259 parcels marked Sold in 2024, 195 in 2025. Around them sit 362 in 2023, the year the file’s record-keeping expanded mid-stream, and 99 in 2026 through August 3. And when a parcel does sell, it has usually been in the city’s hands a very long time: the median parcel sold since 2023 with both dates recorded had been city property for 23.4 years. We report what the inventory shows and take no position on where anyone should live.
The sales pace, against the pile
Set 2025’s 195 sales against the 12,110 parcels the inventory showed owned as of August 3, 2026, and the comparison is simple: last year’s sales equal 1.6 percent of the holdings shown. The gray bars carry a caveat the file itself supplies: the inventory’s disposition columns were expanded in April 2023, and it describes itself as covering property currently or historically owned — so the earlier bars reflect what the current file happens to record about those years, not a complete history of city land sales, and we do not compare the recent years against them. 2023 itself straddles that April change; we verified that all twelve of its months carry disposition records (January through March show 11, 16, and 20), but cannot rule out thinner recording before the expansion, so the firmest comparison is between the two whole years recorded entirely after it: 259 sales in 2024, 195 in 2025 — a 25 percent drop.
The file also shows how much of the inventory is even on the market. Of the 12,110 owned parcels, 874 carried the sales status Offered as of August 3, 2026; 5,681 are marked Interest — the portal’s label for parcels where a buyer can register interest — and 1,570 show a closed application round. The rest carry no active sales status. The slice actually marked Offered is 874 of 12,110 parcels — about one in fourteen.
Where the land is
This inventory overlaps heavily with the geography of our demolition-to-rebuild analysis: Englewood and West Englewood, where that analysis matched rebuild permits to 4 of 237 and 1 of 287 demolition sites respectively, are also the two areas holding the most city-owned parcels, and New City, North Lawndale, Grand Boulevard, and East Garfield Park round out the largest holdings. Our West Englewood and Englewood profiles carry the price and permit history of the two areas at the top of this map.
A generation in the city’s hands
Of the 915 parcels marked Sold with a disposition date since the start of 2023, 693 carry both an acquisition and a disposition date; the other 222 lack a recorded acquisition date and are left out of the timing figures, a gap we flag rather than fill. Among the dated sales, the median parcel had been city property for 23.4 years; a quarter were held under 19.0 years and a quarter over 29.4. 481 of the 693 — nearly seven in ten — had been in the city’s hands for two decades or more. The file does not say how each parcel was acquired or why it stayed so long; what it records is a few hundred recorded sales a year — and among the sales with both dates recorded, most held for decades.
How we counted
- Source: City of Chicago City-Owned Land Inventory (aksk-kvfp), pulled August 3, 2026, the same day the file was last updated. Rows marked Not City Owned (904) or carrying no status (33) are excluded from every figure.
- Counts: the inventory is parcel rows, not acreage or buildings; 837 owned rows carry no community-area name and appear in citywide totals but not on the map. Dispositions are counted by the year in the date_of_disposition field.
- Hold time: acquisition date to disposition date, computed only for parcels sold since January 2023 that carry both dates (693 of 915); parcels missing an acquisition date are excluded and counted. Annual counts are rows marked Sold, by disposition-date year — the same 915 rows from which the hold-time subset with both dates is drawn; four rows carrying 2023 disposition dates but still marked Owned by City are excluded everywhere.
- The record’s own limits: the portal notes new columns were added April 14, 2023, and presents the file as covering property currently or historically owned; disposition counts before 2023 are shown in gray for context and not compared against the recent years. The file explicitly disclaims use as title research, and so do we.
- What this is not: a count of vacant lots (some parcels carry structures or leases), a record of why parcels were acquired, or an appraisal — the file’s land-value column is a city estimate and is not used here.
Computed by KCM Desk from records current to August 3, 2026; published August 3, 2026. If you spot an error, corrections come first.