Thirty vacant lots scattered across West Englewood and South Chicago are about to become 62 new homes, after Mayor Brandon Johnson's administration named four development teams to lead the fourth round of the city's Missing Middle Infill Housing Initiative. The $27.6 million round marks the largest single expansion yet of a program built to convert empty, city-owned parcels into two- and three-flats aimed squarely at the neighborhoods that lost the most housing stock over the past decade.
Blueprint Ventures landed the biggest share of the funding, $9.35 million to build 11 two-flats in West Englewood, according to a statement from the City of Chicago Office of the Mayor. In South Chicago, 75 Development will build eight two-flats with $6.8 million, Vazquez Housing Development will build five two-flats with $6.2 million, and Blazer Jones will build four two-flats and two three-flats with $5.2 million. Mayor Johnson framed the announcement in personal terms in a social media post, writing, “Every vacant lot presents an opportunity to bring new life and new Chicagoans to our neighborhoods,” and adding that Missing Middle is “helping repopulate communities that have experienced decades of disinvestment while incubating the conditions needed to drive new development,” according to Mayor Brandon Johnson.
How the City Sweetens the Deal for Developers
The financial mechanics behind the program are unusual for Chicago real estate. The city sells the vacant municipal lots to selected developers for just $1 per parcel and layers on up to $150,000 per housing unit in construction subsidies, funded through Mayor Johnson's Housing and Economic Development Bond, according to The Real Deal. Those per-unit subsidies are still pending final City Council approval for this fourth round, the outlet's report notes.
The four winning teams weren't chosen in a vacuum. They emerged from a field of 34 developer applications submitted to the Department of Planning and Development after a spring 2026 Request for Applications, the mayor's office says. DPD had offered the 30 parcels in five geographic lot clusters, along West 69th Street in West Englewood and along South Baker and South Buffalo avenues in South Chicago.
Market-Rate Homes With an Income Ceiling
Despite being sold at market rates, the new two- and three-flats come with a built-in affordability rule. Program guidelines require at least one unit per building to be sold to an owner-occupant earning up to 140 percent of Area Median Income, which works out to $134,400 annually for a two-person household in Chicago as of 2026, the report notes. The city has also officially waived its Affordable Requirements Ordinance for Missing Middle projects, reasoning that the built-in price ceiling for low-to-moderate-income buyers already accomplishes the same neighborhood affordability goals without piling on extra set-aside mandates, per the City of Chicago Department of Planning and Development.
Developers apply for these land clusters through ChiBlockBuilder, a centralized online portal the department launched in late 2022 that maps environmental clearance status, zoning, lot dimensions, and market values for city-owned parcels. It's a system designed to replace what used to be a patchwork of disparate municipal land-sale programs with one transparent, searchable database.
A Program Built to Reverse Decades of Lost Housing
Round four builds on real momentum. Before this announcement, Missing Middle had already advanced more than 300 residential units across 106 multi-unit buildings on formerly vacant lots in neighborhoods including McKinley Park, East and West Garfield Park, North Lawndale, Chatham, South Chicago, and Morgan Park. The program traces back to a January 2025 pilot in North Lawndale, where the city selected five minority-led development teams to construct 40 buildings valued at $37.7 million across 35 vacant lots; projects from that pilot, including the 27-unit Trumbull Collection on Drake and Trumbull avenues, broke ground earlier this summer.
The underlying problem the program is trying to solve is well documented. Research from DePaul University's Institute for Housing Studies found that Chicago lost 11,775 housing units in two- to four-unit buildings between 2013 and 2019, with 47.5 percent converted into single-family homes and the rest demolished into vacant land or otherwise repurposed. Deconversions were concentrated in high-cost, gentrifying neighborhoods, while demolitions of neglected structures left thousands of vacant lots across South and West Side communities, per the same research. Chicago separately passed the Connected Communities Ordinance in 2022, requiring property owners inside transit-oriented development buffers to get full City Council zoning approval before deconverting multi-family buildings into single-family homes, a response directly tied to the DePaul findings, according to Jake Tasharski.
Hoodline has tracked similar Missing Middle activity in East Garfield Park this month, where $1 land sales and $150,000-per-unit bond subsidies have already produced new three-flat approvals. Several questions remain open heading into this fourth round: whether the $134,400 income ceiling actually lines up with local median incomes in West Englewood and South Chicago, how quickly the City Council will sign off on the pending bond subsidies, and whether market-rate buyers will snap up the new units fast enough to spur additional investment nearby.
