Setting the Scene: Housing Neglect in Chicago

At one time the fifth most populous city in the world, Chicago lost more than 900,000 residents between 1950 and 2020. As a proportion of peak population, Chicago’s population loss was less severe than in many other U.S. cities impacted by a similar potent combination of suburbanization, white flight, and industrial offshoring during the second half of the 20^th century—St. Louis, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Buffalo, and others shed more than half their peak postwar population, whereas Chicago retained more than 70% of the 3.7 million who called the city home in 1950. Because its peak was much larger than those other cities’, however, Chicago experienced the second steepest real-number population decline of any U.S. city (after Detroit).

Chicago is a deeply segregated city, often ranked as one of the most racially segregated large cities in the country. Residential segregation has long been reinforced by intertwined social and financial factors—relative levels of access to capital across generations, produced by discrimination, continue to reinforce race lines between communities by proxy. Before Black Chicagoans were granted de jure access to the city by the Fair Housing Act in 1968, exploitative land sale contracts were common. The 1968 law did not successfully produce equal opportunity, and Chicagoans have fought for decades to bring mortgage lending in line with federal requirements. That fight continues today, and homeownership rates among white Chicagoans remain much higher than among Black or Latino Chicagoans. As Chicago’s population declined, the patterns of emptiness left behind became highly racialized. Although Chicago’s Black population did not begin to trend downward until the 1980s and its Latino population rose during a time of overall population decline for the city, vacancy, abandonment, and demolition of housing in Chicago first became endemic in majority Black and majority Latino neighborhoods. Generally, this is because communities of color had less influence over local housing conditions than their white counterparts. Because nonwhite communities in Chicago were more likely to have been denied past ownership and shunted from neighborhood to neighborhood at the whims of others’ racially restrictive covenants, highway construction projects, and so on, they generally had less direct control over existing housing in the neighborhoods where they lived than white Chicagoans did. This, in turn, translated into fewer properties passed through multiple generations of the same family down the line, reinforcing financial disparities. Communities of color in Chicago were generally lower income than white communities in the city, living in places where landholders were more likely to be absentees, unaccountable to local leaders and disincentivized to maintain buildings safely. This continues to be the case today.

Systems Function Atomically

Chicago’s history of segregation and unequal housing access is well known, but is often understood in oblique terms. Segregation is systemic, yes, but “systemic” isn’t just a term that floats at the big-picture level—the systems in question drive individual outcomes. In this syllabus, we’ll explore neglected buildings in Chicago one property at a time, and trace their stewardship histories back to these larger patterns. In doing so, we’ll be able to see clearly that residential segregation and financial inequality are continually, actively perpetuated by a multitude of actors in today’s housing landscape, hollowing out neighborhoods of color even while Chicago on the whole begins to regain population.Since 2020, I have assembled an ongoing photo project called Leave the Seat Empty which documents buildings in Chicago at the time a permit is issued for their demolition. It is often not possible to talk to the last person who lived in or owned a subject property; sometimes a building has been vacant for so long that neighbors no longer remember the names of who last lived there. To storytell about these structures, I’ve become familiar with public records covering property transfers, foreclosures, building inspections, and other events that reveal a building’s stewardship trajectory. A couple of those stories are outlined here, and in the next section you’ll pick a vacant property in Chicago and use the same resources I use to research that property.

1222 West 98^th Street

The recent history of 1222 West 98^th Street, permitted for demolition on January 31^st, 2022, is a textbook example of wealth draining from a neighborhood through the mechanisms of foreclosure. Beginning in the late ’80s, the home underwent five separate foreclosure proceedings. As time went on, desperate sales and institutional ownership left their mark. Eventually, the place sold to a suburban man who kept it empty for a decade, leading to a demolition court case that was active for nearly eight years at the time it was knocked down. After an additional foreclosure, the house passed through several hands in rapid succession, out-of-town land value speculators who each profited in a hot market through sales that started at $9,000 in 2018 and most recently ended at $89,000 in 2020. The property is currently owned by a man from Miami, who had the empty house torn down with no apparent plans to build anything in its place. The current owner’s actions suggest possible intent to flip the property once again, with profits going even further from the neighborhood of Longwood Manor than during previous transactions.

6062-6064 South State Street

This building at 6062-6064 South State Street began facing trouble during a period of ownership that lasted from 1973 to 1994, when its commercial and residential units were rented by owners based in Hyde Park, a neighborhood next door that has generally been more economically stable than this neighborhood of Washington Park. The building fell into disrepair while actively occupied, facing issues so severe that the City of Chicago brought the owners to court and eventually prohibited them from allowing anybody to occupy the structure.

From there things get fuzzy for a bit—the building’s deed was transferred to the owner of a real estate management company a few neighborhoods over, then it was briefly deeded to a nonprofit before being deeded back to the owner of the real estate management company while they fell behind on taxes. A new buyer purchased the structure via a county-run delinquent tax sale in 1996, and then that buyer transferred the structure to an anonymous trust in 1997. For the next 13 years, the building continued to decay, and re-entered building court while the owner simultaneously fell behind on mortgage payments, property taxes, and city fines for upkeep. The bank foreclosed on the property in 2010, and it entered a period of inactive stewardship until emerging from a county tax sale in 2014 under new suburbs-based owners, a business entity. Those owners put up for-lease signs on the first floor commercial space, but did not make any permitted repairs to the building and did not actively recruit tenants (there is a tax loophole in Illinois that provides a write-off to owners of empty commercial spaces, even if they don’t make significant attempts to fill them). The building continued to rot and attract fines, and was sold to another business entity (with owners based in a wealthy north suburb) for $90,000 in 2018. Despite continued fines levied against the property, these new owners eventually won the game of absentee land value speculation hot potato—freight giant Norfolk Southern Railway took an interest in the property to expand their nearby rail yard, and paid an inflated $750,000 in 2022 to tear it down. The proceeds from the sale left the city, and the building no longer exists.

Each of these is an instance of the systemic playing out at the level of the atomic. The challenges facing many of Chicago’s neighborhoods should be observed at both scales to be fully understood. Decay of physical structures here is often ultimately a result of racism never resolved, preventing communities of color from maintaining strong control over shared destinies. The daily function of longstanding systemic racism is exerted through vacant landholding, deferred maintenance, and demolition. Even where an area’s physical decline is often popularly attributed to a flashpan event, like the 1968 Chicago riots, a closer inspection reveals a slower progression characterized by individual property holders making increasingly detrimental decisions in places that they don’t feel personally attached to. Those daily facets drive outcomes that accelerate segregation or even directly endanger lives.

Exercise: Diagnosing Decay

If you drop into random residential blocks in Chicago via Google Street View, you’ll eventually come across a vacant building. But without the right tools, it can be hard to know what that building’s recent history contains from appearances alone. How can you find out more about what you see in front of you?

1. Pick a place
   
   Decide on a building whose decay interests you! Maybe it’s the overgrown worker’s cottage at 8315 South Green Street, or the handsome greystone with a legal notice partially peeled off its front windows at 3920 West Wilcox Street, or the two-flat with sturdy metal board-up materials at 1637 South Hamlin Avenue. Maybe it’s a building with a family connection from long ago. Maybe it’s just the first one that caught your eye while cruising through Street View.
   
2. Determine the current owner
   
   Using the Cook County Property Tax Portal, enter the address of the property, search, and note the Mailing Address on file for the property tax bills. This is a likely indicator of the current owner, though there are caveats—sometimes absentee land owners use the address of the property in question as their tax bill mailing address for privacy, and sometimes when a house goes through foreclosure or its owner dies without a clear and settled estate, the tax records aren’t updated to reflect new stewards.
   
3. Dive into the recent history
   
   A few different tools will help tell the story of the property you’ve picked. The Cook County Clerk’s Office Record of Deeds Search is a great, if daunting, starting point—enter the address, click “Address/PIN Search”, and click “View” if the correct address shows up in the results. That’ll bring you to a treasure trove of documents—deeds, municipal liens, foreclosure notifications, and more going back at least to the early 1980s (there are ways to tease out records back to the late 1960s from the same system, but that’s a more advanced topic). Pay close attention to the order of events, and if the property has any deed(s) on record, click “View” on them and look at the scanned PDF(s) of the deed(s) in question. Is the buyer (the grantee) in the most recent transaction a local? Are they an individual, or a business? How much money did the place sell for? Is this the only recent sale, or has the property passed through many hands in a short period?
   
   The City of Chicago Building Permits & Inspection Records search tool might help give you a sense of recent permits filed related to the property and recent building violations recorded against the property. Did one of the recent owners attempt to renovate it, but never complete their work? Has it been cited for being vacant? Are there any violations that might indicate why it fell out of use, like old reports from tenants about unsafe wiring or water damage? Sometimes, even absence of records here is part of the story: building inspections in Chicago are based on a reporting system with long delays and interventions available to inspectors and demolition court are often inadequate, so a building can become troubled for years before any formal municipal action is taken to bring it back to stability or hold its owner accountable for maintenance needs.
   
   Some buildings that are on the city’s radar end up in the Vacant Building Registry, and are subject to occasional inspections as they wind their way through demolition court. Click the dropdown menu next to “Search Vacant Buildings By:” in the top right corner, select address, and fill in the desired property information. If there’s an entry for it, you may be able to sift through years of inspection photos, often giving a glimpse inside the subject building. This can help reveal aspects of a property’s history not captured by formal ownership records, like abandoned personal possessions from somebody who left the place in a hurry or signs of current-day squatting in the formally vacant structure. A home being squatted is evidence enough of a need for it to exist, to provide shelter for somebody, but instead it’s often an object of speculative land value investment for an absentee property holder.

Repeat this exercise a few times, and you’ll detect firsthand the patterns that underlie much of the building vacancy and decay that is common in some Chicago neighborhoods—passage between multiple faraway owners, improper upkeep leading to eventual abandonment, long stretches of time where a place sinks into deeper disrepair before municipal action…once these patterns begin to touch a specific property, they can be challenging to interrupt. And all the while, they tend to move money and agency out of the neighborhoods in question, compounding their own underlying factors.

References and Further Reading

Inequity for Sale – National Public Housing Museum
Dressed for Success – The Chicago Tribune
Where Banks Don’t Lend – WBEZ
Chicago Covenants Project
The Structures That Divide Us – WTTW
Leave the Seat Empty – Soren Spicknall (that’s me!)
Coverage of Commercial Vacancy Tax Loophole – Block Club Chicago
Radical Acts: Amanda Williams’ Color(ed) Theory – MoMA
Disinvested: How Government and Private Industry Let the Main Street of a Black Neighborhood Crumble – ProPublica
Patterns of Lost 2 to 4 Unit Buildings in Chicago – Institute for Housing Studies at DePaul University
The Failures Before The Fires – Better Government Association and The Chicago Tribune
Stacked Decks – Robin Bartram