About

The Large Lot Program is a housing land use approach that was developed as part of the Green Healthy Neighborhoods public planning process. The program is being piloted in community areas where the City owns large amounts of vacant land. The core goals of the program are:

LargeLots.org was built to make the process of purchasing City-owned land through this program easier for residents. It was initiated by Demond Drummer at Teamwork Englewood, built by DataMade, and funded by LISC Chicago with support from the Boeing Corporation, and the Knight Foundation for LISC's OpenGov for the Rest of Us project.

On December 10, 2014, LargeLots.org was officially adopted by the City of Chicago as part of the Large Lot Program. See the passed ordinance.

When Technology and Policy Work Together: Large Lots in Chicago

Demond Drummer and Derek Eder shared their experience combining community organizing and civic technology with LISC Chicago to make LargeLots.org at the 2014 Code for America Summit.

In the talk, Demond tells the history of the Englewood neighborhood, the community meetings that led to the Green Healthy Neighborhoods Land Use Plan and the creation of the Large Lots Pilot. Derek then describes the maturing civic tech community in Chicago and how we were able to put together a multidisciplinary team with LISC, the City of Chicago, Teamwork Englewood and DataMade to enable the policy to succeed.

You can watch the whole thing here:

Built with open data

This site was built using open data from Chicago and Cook County:

We prepared some extracts of the above sources for this project. You can download those here:

Pilot 1: Greater Englewood Area Pilot 2: East Garfield Park Pilot 3: Austin For all available lots, the status column indicates the application status for that lot.

Open source code

All the code for this site is open source and available on Github. We used the following open source tools:

Press

Large Lots 7: Spring 2018

Large Lots 6: Fall 2016 Expansion

Large Lots 5: Auburn Gresham

Large Lots 4: Roseland and Pullman

Large Lots 3: Austin

Large Lots 2: East Garfield Park

Large Lots 1: Greater Englewood Area

Large Lot Program policy and implementation

City of Chicago
Large Lots is a City of Chicago Program
Website by LISC Chicago and DataMade
Updated July, 2020