Fair Home Cash Chicago's vacant-building complaints,
2019 to 2026, city-wide

Three things the city's own data shows

Chicagoans filed 46,399 vacant or abandoned building complaints with 311 from January 1, 2019 through October 13, 2026; the yearly count fell from 6,749 in 2019 to 5,209 in 2025, and 2026 is running 1.2% ahead of the same point in 2025 (City of Chicago Data Portal, dataset v6vf-nfxy, pulled October 13, 2026). Complaints are seasonal: June is the peak month and December the low, and June through August account for 36.1% of all complaints logged in the seven full years 2019 through 2025 (same dataset). The city closes nearly every complaint, but the median time to close went from 22 days in 2022 to 44 days in 2024 and is back to 22 days so far in 2026, while a separate city file of vacant-building violations on properties owned by financial institutions shows court dockets falling from 118 in 2019 to 6 in 2025 (datasets v6vf-nfxy and kc9i-wq85, pulled October 13, 2026).

Every figure on this page is a city-wide total by calendar year or month. Nothing is broken out by community area, ward, ZIP code or address, and no individual complaint, building, owner or respondent is reproduced. The method section explains each query.

Vacant or abandoned building complaints by year

A complaint here is one 311 service request of the type "Vacant/Abandoned Building Complaint". The count is requests created in the year; "closed" is the request's status at the time of the pull; the median is the days from created to closed, over closed requests only. 311 flags some requests as duplicates of an earlier one; those are counted in the totals and shown separately (City of Chicago Data Portal, dataset v6vf-nfxy, pulled October 13, 2026).

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Source: City of Chicago Data Portal, "311 Service Requests", dataset v6vf-nfxy, filtered to sr_type = "Vacant/Abandoned Building Complaint", pulled October 13, 2026. The dataset begins with the launch of the current 311 system in December 2018, so 2019 is its first full year.

Through October 13, 2026 the city had logged 4,568 complaints, against 4,512 over the same January 1 to October 13 stretch of 2025, a 1.2% increase (dataset v6vf-nfxy, pulled October 13, 2026). The 2026 share closed (83.1%) is low mainly because recent requests have not had time to close, and its 22-day median covers only the requests that have closed, so both 2026 figures will move.

Complaints peak in June and bottom out in December

Adding up the seven full years 2019 through 2025 by calendar month, June is the busiest month for vacant-building complaints (5,191) and December the quietest (1,977), a 2.6-to-1 gap. June, July and August together account for 15,105 of the 41,831 complaints in those years, or 36.1%; December, January and February account for 6,160, or 14.7% (City of Chicago Data Portal, dataset v6vf-nfxy, pulled October 13, 2026).

Months are the dataset's created_month field. Only full calendar years are included, so 2026 is left out of the monthly totals. Source: dataset v6vf-nfxy, pulled October 13, 2026.

Department of Buildings violations by year

This is the city's full building-violation record, not only vacant buildings: every violation the Department of Buildings has written against any Chicago property, with its current status. The count is violations by the year of the violation date; the status columns are the violation_status field at the time of the pull, so a 2019 violation marked open in October 2026 has stayed open for most of seven years as far as this record shows (City of Chicago Data Portal, dataset 22u3-xenr, pulled October 13, 2026).

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Source: City of Chicago Data Portal, "Building Violations", dataset 22u3-xenr, pulled October 13, 2026. "Open", "Complied" and "No entry" are the dataset's three violation_status values, shown as written. The portal notes that several violation records can belong to one inspection and that the data do not necessarily reflect a building's current condition.

Violations ran at 89,446 in 2019, dropped to 42,851 in 2020, and have sat near 50,000 a year since 2022 (54,019; 50,176; 49,516; 49,880). The share still marked open climbs toward the present, as it must: a violation written last month has had little time to be marked complied. The more telling column is the older years, where 56.9% of 2019's violations and 55.1% of 2022's still showed as open in October 2026 (dataset 22u3-xenr, pulled October 13, 2026).

The ten most common violations of the last 12 months

Across the 12 months from October 13, 2025 to October 13, 2026 the Department of Buildings recorded 45,479 violations city-wide: 39,610 open, 5,838 complied and 31 no entry at the time of the pull. The descriptions below are the dataset's violation_description values, exactly as the city abbreviates them (dataset 22u3-xenr, pulled October 13, 2026).

Source: dataset 22u3-xenr, pulled October 13, 2026. The abbreviations are the city's. Elevator maintenance lines (the two "ELEVA" entries) are the largest single category of violations written in the period.

Vacant-building violations on properties owned by financial institutions

The city publishes a separate file of vacant and abandoned building violations issued on properties owned by financial institutions, with the docket, the most recent disposition and the dollars assessed, paid and still due. It is a narrow record: by the city's description it covers only properties owned by financial institutions, every record from 2019 on names the Police Department as the issuing department, and the ordinances cited are Chicago Municipal Code 13-12-125 ("Duty to secure and maintain vacant building", cited on 318 of the 322 records) and 13-12-140 ("Watchman required", cited on 303). Fines are set per docket and repeated on each of a docket's records, so the dollar columns below count each docket once (City of Chicago Data Portal, dataset kc9i-wq85, pulled October 13, 2026).

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Source: City of Chicago Data Portal, "Vacant and Abandoned Buildings - Violations", dataset kc9i-wq85, pulled October 13, 2026. The newest record was issued August 21, 2025 and the portal's metadata showed the rows last updated October 8, 2025. "Still due" can exceed fines because it includes administrative costs, court costs and interest the dataset carries alongside the fine; a small credit balance recorded on some non-suited dockets is included as the dataset reports it.

Source: dataset kc9i-wq85, pulled October 13, 2026. All $123,000 in fines sits on the 23 dockets found liable by default; the portal notes that a non-suited or not-liable docket owes nothing.

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