A sprawling portfolio of 812 lots across Chicago’s South and West sides that is up for sale isn't just the largest offering of its kind in the city in recent years. It's also part of a bankruptcy case to settle millions of dollars in fines against a landowner that city lawyers have described as the “worst” in Chicago.
Efforts to sell the parcels, most likely to several buyers, come as some of Chicago’s poorest neighborhoods are attracting the biggest investments they’ve seen in decades, spurred by projects such as a state- and federal-backed quantum computing campus on the south lakefront. Tenants on the campus, once home to a massive U.S. Steel plant, are expected to include IBM and PsiQuantum.
Other available sites are near the United Center, where owners of the NBA’s Chicago Bulls and the NHL's Chicago Blackhawks plan a $7 billion mixed-use development on a sea of parking lots around the arena and near the Barack Obama Presidential Center.
The value of other sites could be boosted by an upcoming extension of the Chicago Transit Authority’s Red Line tracks farther into the South Side, and city and state programs to increase the supply of affordable housing, according to broker Stephen Madura of Hilco Real Estate.
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“These areas have maybe been overlooked or underserved in recent history in Chicago,” Madura said. “Now we are seeing large developments. It’s the perfect storm coming together. This is an opportunity for someone to control huge swaths of these neighborhoods.”
Madura is one of the brokers marketing the properties, listed here by Hilco, for the longtime owners of the sites, Suzie Wilson and her sister, Swedlana Dass. The residents of suburban Northbrook, Illinois, have been in a dispute with city officials over more than $15 million in unpaid tickets for violations such as having tires, trash, overgrown weeds and rats on vacant lots, according to an ongoing investigative reporting series by the Illinois Answers Project and Block Club Chicago on legal troubles connected to the family's decades-old real estate investments.