When a vacant building owned by a financial institution drew a city violation, the case went to administrative hearings, and Chicago publishes that docket: 5,012 violations across 4,175 case dockets, on properties the dataset describes as owned by financial institutions, with coverage stated from January 1, 2011. The activity is concentrated in the early 2010s — about 700 violations a year from 2011 through 2015, eight dated in 2025 as of the file’s October refresh — and its most common recorded ending is the city ending its own case: 80 percent of violations carry the disposition “City non-suit.” The money, counted at the docket grain the file itself uses: $1,530,800 in fines assessed, $1,256,838 paid, and $1,118,370 still listed as due, interest and collection costs included.
Vacant and Abandoned Buildings — Violations, Chicago data portal · file last refreshed October 8, 2025; retrieved August 9, 2026Reading the docket
The dataset covers, in its own words, vacant-building violations on properties owned by financial institutions since January 1, 2011 — it is not a ledger of all vacant buildings, and six rows dated before 2011 sit in it anyway. Nearly every violation cites one or both of two duties in the municipal code’s vacant-building chapter: keeping the building secured and maintained, and posting a watchman. One reading rule matters more than any other: a docket can hold several violations, and the file assesses money per docket, repeating the same dollar figures on each of the docket’s violation rows. Sum the fines column across all 5,012 rows and you get $2,161,700 — an overcount. Summed once per docket, the assessed fines are $1,530,800. The file was last refreshed October 8, 2025, links its own 2021 corrections notice, and is treated here as what it is: a slow ledger, read at its latest state.
Four in five violations ended in “City non-suit”
- City non-suit (incl. set-aside variant)4,16883%
- Liable — by default, plea, or contested finding74315%
- Not liable681%
- Dismissed for want of prosecution — no service271%
- Other recorded labels (scanning errors, denied motions)6
“City non-suit” is the city ending its own case, and it is the recorded outcome on 4,020 violations — 80 percent — with another 148 carrying the label “City Non suit – Motion to set-aside default – Granted,” a variant this page groups in the same family without equating the two procedurally. The liable outcomes — default judgments, pleas, and three contested findings — cover 743 violations, about 15 percent. What the record does not say is why any case was dropped: a non-suit row looks the same whether the building was secured, sold, demolished, settled, or the case refiled, and this page draws no conclusion the disposition field cannot support. The six remaining rows split between “Vendor scanning error” (four) and two denied set-aside motions.
The money, as the file keeps it
- Fines assessed$1,530,800
- Interest$572,829
- Collection costs or attorney fees$353,635
- Court costs$11,276
- Original total due, the file’s own total column$2,494,825
- Paid$1,256,838
- Still listed as due$1,118,370
Interest and collection costs add roughly $940,000 on top of the fines themselves, and the administrative-costs column is zero on every docket. The columns do not fully reconcile, and this page does not force them to: on 651 dockets the file’s original-total-due differs from the sum of its own components by more than a dollar, and across the whole ledger, paid plus still-due falls short — $119,616.49 computed from the file’s unrounded fields, which carry cents the whole-dollar figures above do not show — an unreconciled difference the file does not explain. Some entities’ balances are small negative numbers, which read as overpayments or credits; they are left as published.
Whose buildings
- Bank of America441
- Wells Fargo Bank (two spellings)397
- US Bank238
- JP Morgan Chase Bank178
- Deutsche Bank172
The most frequent respondents, recorded under the names the hearings office typed: Bank of America leads with 441 dockets, Wells Fargo follows at 397 across two spellings of its name, and Deutsche Bank’s trust operations appear under several labels too. Fannie Mae shows up as “Federal Natl Mtg Assn” on 87. Because most dockets ended in non-suit with no fine assessed, docket counts and fine dollars rank differently, and this page ranks only the counts. Being named respondent on a docket is a fact of the case record, not a finding of liability — most of these cases ended without one.
Known limits
The file’s scope is financial-institution-owned properties only, so nothing here describes vacant buildings generally. It shows each violation’s most recent action, not its full history. The dollar figures are the ledger’s October 2025 state and may have moved since; 161 of the 4,175 dockets carry no location code and sit outside the map; six rows predate the stated 2011 start. Respondent names are as recorded, with spelling variants folded only where shown. Nothing here counts vacant buildings, measures their condition, or says what happened to any building after its case closed.
- Sources Vacant and Abandoned Buildings — Violations (kc9i-wq85, 5,012 rows, file last refreshed October 8, 2025), retrieved August 9, 2026, with community areas via the region-code crosswalk derived from the 311 file (v6vf-nfxy: each of the 77 codes assigned the area named by over 95 percent of that code’s 2026 rows, retrieved August 8–9, 2026) and names from the boundary dataset (igwz-8jzy).
- The grain Money fields repeat identically across every violation row of a docket — verified on all 4,175 dockets — so every dollar figure here is summed once per docket. Disposition and violation-type distributions are counted per violation row and labeled as such.
- Groupings The non-suit family sums the file’s two non-suit labels; the liable family sums its default, plea, and contested-finding labels; not-liable sums its four not-liable labels. The groupings are this page’s; the underlying labels are the file’s own wording, and the counts sum to all 5,012 rows.
Computed by KCM Desk from records retrieved August 9, 2026. If you spot an error, corrections come first.