The Docket: Chicago’s Building Scofflaw List, and How Long a Building Can Stay Broken

Twice a year, Chicago publishes a list of buildings tied to code-enforcement cases it has taken to circuit court and has not resolved. It is a short list. On the most recent one, dated Mar 2026, there are 44 buildings. Each entry carries a circuit-court case number, and the case number carries a date. Read them in order and the list stops being an administrative document and starts being a record of how long a building can stay broken.

That is one record, rendered the way the city files it. The case was opened in 2016, which means the city has been in court over this building for about 10 years. It has appeared on 7 of the 10 lists published since Sep 2021. Everything below is that same record, 44 times over.

The docket

Sort by longest listed and four buildings rise to the top with a full row of marks: they have been on every list the city has published since Sep 2021, four and a half years without a gap. Sort by oldest case and the top of the docket is a set of filings from 2016 through 2019, buildings whose court cases are old enough to have started before the pandemic and are still unresolved.

A short list with repeat names

The buildings change more than the names do. Across the full 2021 to 2026 record, 12 names appear on more than one case, and the top of that list is steep: the city’s records name Gong Jin Luo on 38 separate cases and Gary R Carlson on 26. Some entries are companies, some are individuals, and several are land trusts, which is how a good deal of Chicago property is held and which makes the human owner harder to see from the record alone.

Fourteen of them are in one community area

The current list is not spread across the city. South Deering holds 14 of the 44 buildings, roughly a third of Chicago’s entire published scofflaw list in one far Southeast Side community area. South Shore, Greater Grand Crossing, and Chatham account for most of the rest, and the North Side is almost absent. The list records where unresolved court cases are, which is not the same as where buildings are in poor condition.

What being on this list does and does not mean

The scofflaw list is a public record the city maintains and publishes: these are buildings in code-enforcement litigation where the city says compliance has not been reached. Appearing on it is not a criminal conviction, and it is not a finding about any person’s character. Cases resolve, buildings sell, and a name that appears here in one period may be gone from the next list. We report the entries as the city’s own records state them, with the case numbers attached so anyone can look them up.

What the list is unusually good for is measuring duration. A building that appears on ten consecutive lists is one the city kept publishing as unresolved across four and a half years, in its own record.

A short list at the end of a long pipeline

Forty-four buildings is a strikingly short list for a city with hundreds of thousands of them. It helps to know what feeds it. Our analysis of Chicago’s building-code enforcement found the city writing about half as many violations as it did in 2018, with roughly the same inspector budget, and complaint-driven inspections falling hardest. A scofflaw list is the far end of a pipeline: a violation has to be written, then pursued, then litigated, before a building can appear here. When the front of that pipeline is producing half the violations it once did, the pool a list like this draws from is smaller too. We cannot measure how much of the list’s length that explains. The list is best read as a narrow window onto enforcement, not as the full count of buildings in trouble.

How we read the list

• Source: the City of Chicago Building Code Scofflaw List (crg5-4zyp), pulled July 19, 2026: 268 distinct court cases across 10 semiannual snapshots from Sep 2021 to Mar 2026.
• The register: each row’s marks are the snapshots that building appeared on. Ten filled marks means it was on every published list in the window.
• Filing year: parsed from the circuit-court case-number prefix (a case numbered 19-M1- was filed in 2019). It dates the case, not the violation.
• Names: reproduced from the list’s defendant-and-owner field, which sometimes packs an entity and a person into one entry. We count a name as appearing on a case once, and we do not attempt to link separately named companies to common ownership.
• What this is not: a ranking of bad landlords, a measure of building conditions citywide, or a complete inventory of buildings with violations. It is the set of cases the city chose to publish.

Compiled by KCM Desk from the city’s published list, current to March 2026; published July 19, 2026. Corrections and updates on any entry: tell us and we will check the record.

Related Keep Chicagoland Moving coverage

• Chicago Still Budgets 200 Building Inspectors. It Writes Half as Many Violations.
• Who Is Buying Chicago? We Read the Buyer’s Name on 241,653 Deeds
• Chicago on the Clock: We Timed 793,774 Service Requests
• Chicago Housing, by the Numbers