Neighborhoods · Northwest Side
Why people love it
The shortest walk to the 606 of anywhere in the city, with the same access as Wicker Park and fewer bars underneath you.
What's drawing people
Foundry Park, approved on 34 riverfront acres, with $201.6 million in public money now attached to it.
The value
Expensive and finished on the surface. Underneath, older two-flats owned for decades in a neighborhood where rents kept climbing.
What people say about Bucktown
Bucktown is the part of Logan Square that already finished changing. The interesting question here is not whether you missed it. It is what a $200 million public investment does to the blocks nearest the river.
Bucktown sits between Western, the river, North Avenue, and Fullerton, and it has the shortest walk to the 606 of anywhere in the city. The housing is a mix of workers' cottages that have been raised and gutted, newer single-family infill, and the two-flats and three-flats that are the reason I pay attention here.
People pick Bucktown over Wicker Park when they want the same access with fewer bars underneath them, and over Lincoln Park when they do not want to pay Lincoln Park prices for a smaller yard.
The thing actually happening right now is Foundry Park. In February 2026 the City Council approved the successor to the failed Lincoln Yards project, on roughly 34 vacant acres of the old Finkl Steel site along the river between Bucktown and Lincoln Park. JDL Development and Kayne Anderson Real Estate are behind it, the approved plan runs up to 3,737 residences with 20% affordable, and the first construction phase is around $800 million.
The public money is on the table too. In June 2026 the city's Community Development Commission approved a $201.6 million TIF subsidy, roughly $70.9 million of it for roadway work including extensions of Dominick and Kingsbury streets and Southport Avenue, with most of the balance going to new parks. That is a commission approval rather than the final word, but public infrastructure money of that size does not usually reverse.
This is the single biggest thing happening to Bucktown property values and it has not fully priced in. A project that size takes years. If you buy on the east side of the neighborhood you are buying next to a construction site for a while, and next to a finished neighborhood after that.
The common complaint is that Bucktown is expensive and finished and there is nothing left to do here. The first half is right. The second half is what people said in 2009. What is actually left is a specific, boring opportunity: older two-flats and three-flats owned by people who bought decades ago, in a neighborhood where the rents have kept climbing and the buildings have not been updated to match. That is not a glamorous thesis. It is the one that works.
Last updated August 2026.
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