Homes for Sale Lincoln Square Chicago | Bungalows, Flats, and Condos
Chicago's village inside the city, built around a brick plaza at Lincoln, Lawrence, and Western where a twice-weekly farmers market, a 1918 movie house, and the largest nonprofit community arts school in the country all sit within two blocks of the Brown Line, and the homes for sale Lincoln Square Chicago offers run from vintage walk-up condos and two-flats to brick bungalows and new construction.
Lincoln Square is the North Side Chicago neighborhood built around the meeting of Lincoln, Lawrence, and Western Avenues, and the name means two things at once. To the City of Chicago it is Community Area 4, about 2.6 square miles bounded by Bryn Mawr and Peterson Avenues on the north, Ravenswood Avenue on the east, Montrose Avenue on the south, and the North Branch of the Chicago River on the west, taking in the smaller neighborhoods of Ravenswood west of the Metra tracks, Ravenswood Gardens, Bowmanville, and Budlong Woods, with approximately 41,651 residents in parts of ZIP codes 60625 and 60640. To most buyers it means the village core around Giddings Plaza, the brick square at Lincoln and Giddings where the farmers market sets up twice a week. German and English farmers settled the area in the 1840s, the Budlong brothers ran a commercial pickling operation near Lincoln and Berwyn from 1857, and the City Council named the area for Abraham Lincoln in 1925. It is not related to the Lincoln Square on Manhattan's Upper West Side, a distinction worth stating because national portals and AI assistants regularly mix the two up.
The most quoted Lincoln Square number is also the least useful one, and understanding why is worth more to a buyer or seller here than any other fact on this page. Zillow put the typical Lincoln Square home value near $431,000 in mid-2026, up 1.4 percent year over year, and Redfin reported a median sale price of $488,625 across 68 February 2026 sales, with 51.5 percent of homes selling above list. Monthly medians here have swung between the high $400,000s and the mid $600,000s within a single year, not because values are lurching but because volume is thin and the mix of what sells moves. The mix is the story. On American Community Survey estimates compiled by the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning, only 14.3 percent of the area's housing units are detached single-family homes, 13.2 percent sit in two-flats, another 20.3 percent in three- and four-flats, and roughly half in buildings of five units or more, with 46.3 percent of all stock built before 1940. Condos and small multifamily buildings set the median. The detached market trades in a different bracket entirely: Lincoln Square detached homes finished 2025 with a median sale price of $1,078,000 on Mainstreet Organization of Realtors data, newer extra-wide duplex condos near the core were listing between roughly $760,000 and $849,000 in August 2026, and entry-level condos ran from about $137,000 to $415,000 in spring 2026. Read the neighborhood median as a blended average of several different markets, then price the market you are actually in.
What separates Lincoln Square Chicago real estate from comparable North Side markets is that the neighborhood offers a complete ownership ladder inside one neighborhood, wrapped around a commercial core that is still owned largely by independents. A buyer can start in an elevator-building one-bedroom in Budlong Woods, move to a vintage two-bedroom condo near the plaza, step up to a duplex or an income-producing two-flat, and finish in a brick bungalow, a foursquare, or a new build, all without changing school boundaries, coffee shops, or train stops. Two-flats deserve a specific mention, because at 13.2 percent of the housing stock they are the neighborhood's classic path to owning with a tenant paying part of the mortgage, and they are the product that disappears fastest in strong springs. Against Lincoln Park, where Redfin's median ran $885,000 over the three months ending June 2026, Lincoln Square trades the lakefront for interior-street quiet, village retail, and four Brown Line stops. Supply is changing in one visible place: Western Avenue, where the 63-unit Canvas at Leland Plaza opened in February 2025 and a 73-unit building at 4640 N. Western received its full permit in August 2026, both consistent with the 2019 Lincoln Square Master Plan, while the interior streets stay low-rise.
Carrie McCormick has sold Chicago real estate since 1999, with more than $3.5 billion in career sales and a practice that runs from Gold Coast penthouses to the North Side's vintage housing stock, which is exactly the range a Lincoln Square move usually spans. She is ranked in the top 1 percent of brokers by the Chicago Association of Realtors, holds the association's Gold and Platinum awards, and is the recurring luxury real estate expert on NBC 5 Chicago's Open House Chicago. Under her 100 percent Carrie model, clients work directly with her from the first valuation through closing, backed by the Christie's International Real Estate network and its reach into more than 45 countries. Whether you are pricing a two-flat against thin comparables, competing for a bungalow on a wide lot, or selling a condo the portals have mislabeled into the wrong neighborhood, call 312-961-4612.
Giddings Plaza, the brick square where Lincoln Avenue meets Giddings Street, functions the way a small-town square is supposed to. The Lincoln Square Farmers Market runs Tuesday mornings and Thursday afternoons from May through November with more than 40 farmers and food makers, the plaza's Thursday evening summer concert series returned in 2026 after a hiatus of nearly four years, and Maifest came back to its original home at Lincoln and Western over May 29 to 31, 2026.
The Old Town School of Folk Music, founded in 1957 and the largest nonprofit community arts school in the United States, has anchored Lincoln Avenue since it moved into the former Hild Library building at 4544 N. Lincoln in 1998, with a second facility across the street. It runs concerts, group classes, and the Wiggleworms early-childhood music program, and it co-produces the Square Roots festival, which drew Margo Price, Nick Lowe, and Dehd to Lincoln Avenue over July 10 to 12, 2026.
The Davis Theater at 4614 N. Lincoln opened in 1918 as the Pershing, was designed by Walter W. Ahlschlager, the architect of New York's Roxy Theatre, and is the only survivor of the five theaters Lincoln Square once had. Added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2016 and restored the same year, it runs first-run films and repertory nights on three screens, with the Carbon Arc Bar and Board attached so dinner and the movie sit under one roof.
The neighborhood's German history survives as working businesses rather than plaques. Merz Apothecary, founded in 1875 and past its 150th year, still fills its Lincoln Avenue shop with European remedies and soaps. Gene's Sausage Shop and Delicatessen at 4750 N. Lincoln smokes more than 40 varieties of sausage and opened its rooftop beer and wine garden for the 2026 season on Memorial Day weekend. The DANK Haus German American Cultural Center, founded in 1959 in a 1927 building at 4740 N. Western, runs a museum, gallery, and language school, and it preserved the bar from the Chicago Brauhaus after that landmark restaurant closed in 2017. The German-American Fest and its Saturday parade return to Lincoln Square September 11 to 13, 2026.
The CTA Brown Line serves the neighborhood at Western, Rockwell, Damen, and Montrose, putting the Loop about 30 to 40 minutes away, and the Ravenswood Metra station at 4800 N. Ravenswood, rebuilt between 2012 and 2023 and one of the busiest stops on the Union Pacific North Line, adds a fast commuter-rail option with a Mariano's grocery beside the platform. About 22 percent of households here get by without a car, and the daily-needs list, groceries, pharmacies, hardware, the library, fits inside a walk.
Lincoln Square lets a buyer enter in an elevator-building condo in Budlong Woods for well under $200,000, move up through vintage condos and two-flats, and finish in a renovated bungalow or a new-construction house, without ever leaving. That internal ladder is rare on the North Side, it is why so many owners here buy two or three times in the same square mile, and it is the structure the rest of this page is organized around.
The community area is small enough to cross by bike in fifteen minutes and varied enough that the pocket a home sits in changes its price, its product type, and its buyer pool. Broadly, the village core sits in the middle, Ravenswood runs along the Metra embankment to the east, Ravenswood Gardens tucks into the river bend to the southwest, Bowmanville spreads north of Foster, and Budlong Woods fills the northwest corner along the river. Characterizations below reflect typical recent activity and should be treated as a general guide rather than a valuation.
Lincoln Square eats close to home, and the anchors have real tenure. Bistro Campagne at 4518 N. Lincoln has served French bistro classics beside one of the prettiest garden patios in the city since 2002, and it is still drawing full rooms nearly 25 years in. Gene's Sausage Shop grills its housemade bratwurst on a wood fire in the rooftop beer and wine garden on summer weekends. Spacca Napoli at 1769 W. Sunnyside in Ravenswood has baked Neapolitan pizza in an oven built by artisans from Naples since 2006 and remains a citywide destination. Monti's at 4757 N. Talman has built cheesesteaks on Amoroso rolls shipped from Philadelphia since 2012, rebuilding after a 2020 fire and coming back stronger. Carbon Arc Bar and Board pairs cocktails and an American menu with the Davis Theater next door, and the Balmoral brewery block gives Bowmanville a taproom evening with Half Acre's beer garden and Spiteful Brewing side by side. Be aware the roster turns over: the Chicago Brauhaus, Huettenbar, Cafe Selmarie, Luella's Southern Kitchen, and the Michelin-starred Atelier have all closed or left since 2017, and the acclaimed tasting-menu restaurant Goosefoot announced a move to 4520 N. Lincoln in early 2026.
The retail on Lincoln Avenue is still overwhelmingly independent, which is increasingly rare on the North Side. Merz Apothecary has sold European remedies, soaps, and tinctures from its wood-cabineted shop since 1875. The Book Cellar at 4736 N. Lincoln combines an independent bookstore with a cafe pouring coffee and wine, and hosts a steady calendar of author readings. Timeless Toys at 4749 N. Lincoln stocks the kind of toy inventory that makes gift shopping a fifteen-minute errand, and Laurie's Planet of Sound keeps a record-store presence on the strip. For groceries, the choices stack by style: Gene's for the European deli counter, HarvesTime Foods at 2632 W. Lawrence for an independent full-line grocer with a serious produce section, the Mariano's beside the Ravenswood Metra platform for the big weekly run, and the twice-weekly farmers market from May through November.
Welles Park is the neighborhood's 15.84-acre living room at Lincoln and Montrose, opened in 1910 and named for Gideon Welles, Abraham Lincoln's Secretary of the Navy. Its green wrought-iron gazebo, added in 2004, hosts summer concerts, its NaturePlace natural playground and ball fields fill on weekends, and its fieldhouse pool and fitness center are temporarily closed during a park renovation. Next door, the Conrad Sulzer Regional Library at 4455 N. Lincoln is one of the Chicago Public Library's two regional libraries. Winnemac Park spreads across roughly 40 acres of shared Chicago Park District and Chicago Public Schools land at Foster and Damen, with prairie plantings, trails, and the Amundsen and Chappell campuses inside it. Rosehill Cemetery's 350 Victorian acres, entered through William W. Boyington's castellated 1864 gate, function as the area's quietest walking landscape, with Tiffany windows in its 1914 mausoleum and graves including Oscar Mayer, Montgomery Ward, and Richard Sears. The cultural calendar runs spring to fall: Maifest at Lincoln and Western in late May, the Square Roots festival each July outside the Old Town School, the German-American Fest and its parade each September, and the chamber's Apple Fest each fall.
Lincoln Square is served by a single school district, Chicago Public Schools, formally City of Chicago School District 299, so there is no district-boundary question here. What changes block by block is the attendance area, because the community area splits across several elementary boundaries, and Chicago also assigns some schools by application or test rather than by address. Verify the current attendance area for any specific address with the CPS School Locator before making a decision.
Waters Elementary at 4540 N. Campbell is the core's attendance-area school and its strongest listing-copy currency, a preK through 8 fine and performing arts magnet cluster school with about 700 students, a long-running ecology and garden program, an A minus from Niche, and a 7 out of 10 from GreatSchools. McPherson Elementary at 4728 N. Wolcott serves much of the Ravenswood side and runs International Baccalaureate Middle Years programming, with a B minus from Niche. Budlong Elementary at 2701 W. Foster (Niche B) and Chappell Elementary at 2135 W. Foster (Niche B plus) cover the northern and eastern pockets, with Chappell sharing the Winnemac Park campus, and Jamieson Elementary (Niche B plus) serves Budlong Woods, where the community area's northernmost addresses feed Mather High School rather than Amundsen.
Amundsen High School at 5110 N. Damen is the attendance-area high school for most of the community area, a school of about 1,437 students set inside the roughly 40-acre Winnemac Park campus and named for the polar explorer Roald Amundsen. It is a fully authorized International Baccalaureate World School offering both the Middle Years and Diploma Programmes, and admission works on three tracks worth understanding before a purchase: an address in the attendance area always guarantees a seat at Amundsen, the IB program itself is selective and admits by grades and test scores through GoCPS, and the Grow Community partnership gives students from feeder elementaries including Waters, McPherson, Budlong, Chappell, and Jamieson an admissions preference. Niche grades the school A minus; published ratings vary by source and cycle, so read the current numbers directly rather than taking any single grade on reputation.
Lane Tech College Prep, one of the city's flagship selective-enrollment high schools, sits about a mile south at 2501 W. Addison, and one point matters more than any ranking: admission is by application, test score, and the district's tier system, not by home address, so no Lincoln Square purchase guarantees a seat there. The private market inside the neighborhood is anchored by two Catholic schools under Queen of Apostles Parish. Queen of Angels at 4520 N. Western, a National Blue Ribbon Award winner, serves children from age two through grade 8 with about 338 students at an 11 to 1 student-teacher ratio, and St. Matthias at 4910 N. Claremont is a preK through 8 International Baccalaureate World School. For higher education, North Park University's campus sits directly across the river at 3225 W. Foster.
Development accelerated with Potter Palmer's mansion in 1882.
Encompasses the historic core alongside the 60611 district.
Consisting of roughly 5,600 households averaging two people.
Historically one of America's wealthiest urban enclaves.
Neighborhood entry point, driven heavily by vintage condominium volume.
The current baseline for standard attached housing stock.
Set in 2017 by the purchase of the top four floors at No. 9 Walton.
The neighborhood's largest single source of high-rise inventory.
With a median asking price currently hovering near $585,000.
The average market pace alongside ~45 monthly closings.
Connected directly to the trail via Oak Street Beach.
Direct access via two CTA train stops and four major bus routes.
Navigating Chicago's Gold Coast luxury real estate market requires unparalleled expertise. Here is what you need to know before we begin.
Ask A QuestionTreat the average with care, because in Lincoln Square it blends several markets into one number. Zillow put the typical home value near $431,000 in mid-2026 and Redfin's February 2026 median was $488,625, but those figures are set by condos and small multifamily units, which dominate sales volume. Detached houses, only about 14 percent of the housing stock, finished 2025 at a median of $1,078,000 on Mainstreet Organization of Realtors data, newer extra-wide duplex condos were listing between roughly $760,000 and $849,000 in August 2026, and entry condos started around $137,000. In practice, the homes for sale Lincoln Square Chicago puts on the market in any given month span more than a tenfold price range, so narrow by product type before treating any figure as meaningful.
Lincoln Square is on Chicago's North Side, about eight miles northwest of the Loop, and the name carries two scales. The official community area covers about 2.6 square miles between Bryn Mawr and Peterson Avenues on the north, Ravenswood Avenue on the east, Montrose Avenue on the south, and the Chicago River on the west, and it contains Ravenswood west of the Metra tracks, Ravenswood Gardens, Bowmanville, and Budlong Woods. The village core most people picture is much smaller, the blocks around the Lincoln, Lawrence, and Western intersection and Giddings Plaza. It is unrelated to the Lincoln Square neighborhood in Manhattan, which is worth knowing because national search results routinely mix the two cities up.
Most of Lincoln Square uses ZIP code 60625, and the eastern edge of the community area, roughly the Ravenswood blocks toward the Metra tracks, falls in 60640. Neither ZIP maps cleanly to the neighborhood: 60625 continues west across the river through Albany Park, North Park, and Ravenswood Manor, and 60640 runs east through Uptown to the lakefront. That is why searching listings by ZIP code returns homes well outside Lincoln Square, and why this page recommends searching by boundary streets or with an agent's MLS filters instead.
Yes, but they are the scarce product. Detached houses make up about 14.3 percent of the area's housing units, mostly brick bungalows, foursquares, workers cottages, and a growing number of new builds, and they finished 2025 at a median sale price of $1,078,000. Two details drive pricing within that market. First, lot width: standard 25-foot Chicago lots and oversized lots support different homes, and wide-lot properties draw both end users and builders. Second, location within the area, since a house near Giddings Plaza or inside the Waters Elementary boundary competes differently than one in Bowmanville or Budlong Woods. Because so few detached homes trade, sellers should be priced from a handful of true comparables and buyers frequently need to be positioned before a house is publicly listed.
Lincoln Square is one of the North Side's stronger condo markets to enter, because the stock covers every budget tier. Most of the condos for sale Lincoln Square Chicago offers at entry level sit in mid-century elevator buildings in Budlong Woods and vintage walk-ups near the core, listing from about $137,000 to $415,000 in spring 2026, often with heat included in the assessment. The middle tier is vintage two- and three-bedroom condos and duplexed-down units in two-flats and courtyard buildings, and the top tier is extra-wide new-construction duplexes near the core in the $700,000s and $800,000s. Before offering, review the association's finances and rental rules, because Lincoln Square Chicago condos for sale range from investor-friendly buildings to associations with strict rental caps, and that difference changes both financing and resale.
Lincoln Square is served by one district, Chicago Public Schools, District 299, so the question is which attendance area a specific address falls in. Waters Elementary, a fine and performing arts magnet cluster school with an A minus from Niche, covers the core; McPherson, Budlong, Chappell, and Jamieson cover other pockets. Amundsen High School, a fully authorized International Baccalaureate World School inside Winnemac Park, guarantees a seat to attendance-area students, runs a selective IB program admitted through GoCPS, and gives Grow Community feeder schools an admissions preference; the far northern blocks feed Mather instead. Private options inside the neighborhood include Queen of Angels, a National Blue Ribbon school, and St. Matthias, an IB World School. Verify any address with the CPS School Locator before relying on a boundary.
Daily life runs at village pace with city infrastructure underneath it. Errands, the farmers market, the Davis Theater, the Old Town School, and four Brown Line stops all sit within a walk, the Loop is about 30 to 40 minutes by train, and the calendar moves from Maifest in late May through Square Roots in July to the German-American Fest in September and Apple Fest each fall. The honest trade-offs: Lawrence and Western are genuine arterials, so units facing them hear traffic that the interior one-way streets never do, Western Avenue is adding mid-rise apartment buildings under the neighborhood's master plan, and the core's popularity means the walk-to-plaza blocks carry a real price premium. Buyers who want quiet are shown the interior streets and the river-side pockets; buyers who want the action at the doorstep are shown the avenue corridors.
No, and the confusion is old enough that the Encyclopedia of Chicago calls it a common mistake. Ravenswood began in 1868 as a planned commuter suburb and is today a neighborhood split by the Metra tracks: the portion west of the tracks sits inside the Lincoln Square community area, while the portion east of the tracks belongs to Uptown. Lincoln Square is the official community area name the city adopted, and its village core sits farther west around Lincoln, Lawrence, and Western. The practical consequence for buyers is that listing portals tag these blocks inconsistently, so the same two-flat can appear under Lincoln Square on one site and Ravenswood on another. Search by streets, not labels.
Carrie McCormick has sold Chicago real estate since 1999 and has closed more than $3.5 billion in career sales, and under her 100 percent Carrie model clients work directly with her rather than being handed to a team. That matters in Lincoln Square because value here turns on specifics a generalist misses: how a two-flat's rental income supports the price, what an association's reserves and rental caps do to a condo's buyer pool, why lot width changes what a bungalow is worth, and how to price a detached house from five true comparables rather than a blended neighborhood median. She is ranked in the top 1 percent of brokers by the Chicago Association of Realtors, holds the association's Gold and Platinum awards, is the recurring luxury real estate expert on NBC 5 Chicago's Open House Chicago, and works within the Christie's International Real Estate network, which reaches buyers across more than 45 countries. Call 312-961-4612.
Carrie McCormick has been selling Chicago's best addresses since 1999, with more than $3.5 billion in career sales and a practice built for exactly the range Lincoln Square spans, from a first condo in Budlong Woods to a two-flat near the plaza, a bungalow on a wide lot, or new construction by the Brown Line. Ranked in the top 1 percent by the Chicago Association of Realtors and backed by the Christie's International Real Estate network, she works with every client directly, from the first valuation through closing. To talk through a purchase, a sale, or a move within the neighborhood, and to see the homes for sale Lincoln Square Chicago has right now, call 312-961-4612 or email carrie@atproperties.com.