Legal Question in Real Estate Law in Illinois

Sounds like you'd like to unburden yourself of a useless piece of property to stop the tax bill. The city is not obligated to take it off your hands, even if it is next to public property. But when you say "back to", it sounds like you acquired it from the city in the first place. You'd have to look at the transactional documents from the acquisition to determine whether any rights or remedies remain -- usually they "disappear" once there's a conveyance, but if not it is impossible to tell from the few facts you've given us.

Don't pay the property taxes. What happens is that the property eventually will be offered in an "annual tax sale" conducted by the local municipality responsible for conducting such a sale. In Chicago, the County Treasurer conducts the sale. If the property is picked up at a tax sale by a third party purchaser (just the taxes that is), there will be a statutory "waiting period" in which theoretically, the property owner has a right to "redeem" if he/she chooses to, by paying all the back taxes, penalties and interest. If the period goes by and the owner of the property doesn't "redeem", then the third party tax purchaser may file in Circuit Court to obtain a "tax deed" in order to take title to the property.

That being said, the owner could still have responsibilities during the statutory "waiting period" for instance, if there is an ordinance violation, the City will serve notice on the owner to answer the complaint in Circuit Court which could provoke monetary damages if such a lawsuit is ignored.

If this is your chosen action, I would recommend still cutting the grass and doing "light" maintenance around the property so as not to end up in Court for such an infraction.

In Cook County, there is also a possibility that the property will not be "purchased" in an annual tax sale in which case, the property will be held until a secondary tax sale, called a "scavenger sale". If the property does not sell in that sale, the property will continue to be offered "over the counter" by the municipality. Thus, there are no guarantees that the owner of the property will get out from owning the property as a matter of course.