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.
“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.
Chicago lawyers in court filings related to the fines have described Wilson as a “scourge on the city and its residents” and “the city’s worst landlowner.”
Through the Hilco brokers, the sisters who own the portfolio declined to comment to CoStar News.
Decades of deals
Wilson and her late husband, tax attorney Richard Wilson, gradually assembled the portfolio through decades of tax-sale purchases in which investors can take ownership of properties by buying their unpaid property taxes, with bids starting at $250, according to the media reports.
Sales from the 812-property portfolio, which must receive approval from a federal bankruptcy court, could help pay off the fines. Madura declined to estimate how much the sales are expected to total toward that end, but Hilco said the most recent combined Cook County-assessed value was $22.4 million.
That would mean even after paying off fines and legal fees, the sisters could stand to pocket millions of dollars.
Many of the mostly vacant lots are standard parcels for single-family homes, but the portfolio includes some larger assemblages on commercial corridors such as Lake, State and LaSalle streets, Ashland Avenue, and Pulaski Road. The sites are zoned for residential, commercial and industrial uses.
Larger parcels include several contiguous sites in the 5600 block of South Street and in the 3100 block of W. Lake Street.
The deadline for bids is March 7.
Hilco brokers say they expect multi-property offers from residential and commercial developers, but they add it is unlikely a single buyer could acquire the entire portfolio.
For the record
In addition to Madura, the sellers are represented by Joel Schneider, Michael Kneifel and Henry Nash at Hilco.