You've got to do some digging. Boarded up windows and overgrown lawns are great indicators of abandoned properties, but sometimes these rundown structures are merely 'vacant,' and the owners still very much want to keep their decrepit investment. Most potentially abandoned buildings are reported to the city itself using Chicago's 311 system, and all these reports can be found on the Chicago Data Portal (our map tool pulls some of its data from these reports). However, these calls are only warning signs that someone noticed something odd about the place: they're far from proof that no one's claiming it.

In order to figure that out, you'll need to figure out who currently holds the deeds and titles to the property you're interested. A fantastic resource to use for this process is found on the city's main website: Check Status of Vacant Property Here

If you can't find any information there, try cookcountypropertyinfo.com, where several major city departments keep an aggregated collection of tax information on individual parcels of land within Cook County. If those fail, you'll need to get creative! Try the methods described in this article.
It varies from building to building, but most commonly abandonment happens through a process known as Bank Waffling.
The bad kind. Bank waffling has nothing to do with breakfast: it happens when the owner of a property fails to pay their mortgage, and the bank begins the foreclosure process on that property. The owner then leaves because they assume the bank is taking the property back, but for whatever reason the bank doesn't ever actually take it. If you go looking for the 'owner' of this property now, you'll find that the original owner says they're gone and have no ties with it, and the bank says they don't own it because they never completed the process. It's a legal nightmare!
No, because abandoned buildings aren'’'t on the market, per se. The deeds to them are still owned by someone or some company, and in order to get your hands on those titles you're going to have to start doing some research to figure out who owns the various pieces in that parcel's legal bundle (See Bundle of Rights). A fantastic place to start this process is on cookcountypropertyinfo.com, where several major city departments keep an aggregated collection of data on individual parcels of land within Cook County.
It depends! See our What Can You Do? page for more information on the process of obtainment.