Buying Vacant Land in Cook County: the Land Bank Authority and Chicago's ChiBlockBuilder

The Cook County Land Bank Authority: countywide redevelopment tool

The Cook County Land Bank Authority (CCLBA) was created by county ordinance in 2013 to address the county's large inventory of vacant residential, industrial, and commercial property, and is described as the largest land bank by geography in the country. It acquires property through purchase, donation, forfeiture, and other transfers, working in collaboration with individual municipalities and other partners across Cook County -- and for certain acquisition paths (municipal lien foreclosure, deed in lieu of foreclosure, no-cash bids), it can abate back taxes owed on the property. Once acquired, a property is exempt from property taxes while held by the CCLBA, which may demolish or secure a structure for rehabilitation, or hold the parcel until it's ready to be conveyed for development, demolition, or deconstruction. The CCLBA reports having acquired and transformed more than 2,500 properties across Cook County since 2014.

Because the CCLBA works across dozens of separate municipalities, the practical starting point for a specific property or neighborhood often runs through both the CCLBA directly and the local municipality's own community development or planning office -- confirm current inventory, eligibility criteria, and pricing for a specific parcel or area directly with the CCLBA rather than assuming it operates like an open real estate listing service.

Chicago's ChiBlockBuilder: the city's own consolidated vacant-lot portal

Within the City of Chicago specifically -- by far the largest and most vacant-lot-rich municipality in Cook County -- the Department of Planning and Development consolidated several previously separate vacant-land disposition programs into a single portal, ChiBlockBuilder, as of November 2022. That consolidation folded in the Adjacent Neighbors Land Acquisition Program (ANLAP), a Sealed Bid program, a Negotiated Sale program, and the long-running Large Lots program (which had sold qualifying vacant, residentially zoned, city-owned lots for $1 per parcel to adjacent property owners, block clubs, and nonprofit groups in select neighborhoods). At the time of consolidation, ChiBlockBuilder's map showed more than 9,000 vacant, city-owned lots citywide, with roughly 2,214 of them reported as actively for sale.

Separately, the City Lots for Working Families (CL4WF) program specifically targets affordable-housing construction: it sells qualifying vacant city-owned lots for $1 each to developers building affordable single-family homes or two-flats -- a restricted-purpose program rather than a general low-cost lot giveaway for any buyer. If you're a developer or builder rather than an individual looking for a personal lot, confirm CL4WF's current eligibility criteria directly with the city, since program terms and qualifying-lot inventory change over time.

Whichever program applies, confirm a specific lot's current zoning district and buildable status with the City of Chicago's Department of Planning and Development before finalizing any offer -- a lot's inclusion in a city-owned inventory doesn't override the zoning, minimum lot size, and setback rules that would apply to any other Chicago parcel.

Outside Chicago: check with the CCLBA and the specific municipality

This page focuses on the CCLBA (countywide) and Chicago's ChiBlockBuilder (city-specific) because they are, by a wide margin, the two largest, best-documented public land-disposition mechanisms found in this research pass. This pass did not find a comparable large-scale, standalone vacant-lot sale portal specific to any of Cook County's dozens of other incorporated suburbs -- which doesn't mean none exists, only that a specific suburb's own village or city hall, together with the CCLBA, is the more reliable starting point than assuming a Chicago-style program exists elsewhere in the county.