https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0284-3744
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ABSTRACT
Between 2014 and 2020, the city of Chicago sold hundreds of city-owned lots for a dollar to property owners across its South and West Side neighborhoods through the Large Lots program. An expedient way of returning city land to tax rolls and offsetting its holding costs, the city cast Large Lots as an effort to empower residents and turn vacant lots into vibrant neighborhoods. This article examines the labor of making vibrant neighborhoods. Against its erasure by the dominant planning imagination, I situate this labor as an important dimension of life's work under regimes of organized abandonment and their attendant economies of real estate speculation. Through interviews and participant-observation with lot owners, I demonstrate that Large Lots has reconfigured relations of responsibility and obligation around vacant land in ways that enroll residents’ social reproductive labor of land care into the production of investable landscapes. Through a property records analysis, I then show that this labor unfolds in tension with renewed channels for speculation established by Large Lots in program neighborhoods. These findings situate social reproduction as a generative vantage point for politically capacious understandings of real estate speculation and the uneven geographies of life-making it engenders.
Acknowledgements
My gratitude goes to the Large Lot owners who generously shared their time and experiences with me, and who made this research possible. I am grateful for the financial support that the Wenner-Gren Foundation provided for the fieldwork that informs this article. Many thanks to Carrie Freshour, Clara Lemme Ribeiro, Kate Derickson, and Keavy McFadden for their brilliant feedback on various drafts of this article, and to Anne Bonds and the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments.
Research ethics and consent
All participants in this study provided informed verbal consent for their data to be used anonymously in this research and publications informed by it. The study was reviewed and approved by the University of Illinois Institutional Review Board.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Data availability statement
The participants of this study did not give written consent for their data to be shared publicly, so due to the sensitive nature of the research supporting data is not available.
Notes
1 Both lenders were in HUD's Subprime Lenders List on the years they issued the mortgages.
2 See Bhattacharya and Ferguson (Citationn.d.) for an elaborate discussion of “life-making”.
3 According to its city-owned land inventory, the city owned around 14,000 lots in fall 2023.
4 I borrow “collective flourishing” from Meehan and Strauss's (Citation2015, p. 2) framing of social reproduction as a lens into the “unequal distribution of conditions of flourishing”.
5 I adopt residents' understanding of Englewood, which includes the Englewood and West Englewood community areas. In some circles, these areas are called “Greater Englewood.” I use the more popular name, “Englewood”.
6 495 lots were sold in the study neighborhoods in 2014 and 2017. 20 lots were not analyzed due to missing or unreliable property records.
7 Homeowner exemptions are an imperfect indicator of investor ownership. Some homeowners do not apply for this exemption despite residing in their home, and properties sold to investor-owners within the last tax year may have an exemption in the records from the previous owner. Nevertheless, homeowner exemptions are the most reliable indicator available in property records and are commonly used to identify investor-owners.
8 I referenced Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) rate spread thresholds and two additional indicators of high-risk or subprime lending to categorize mortgages based on loan price and risk. The HMDA defines as “higher priced” those first-lien mortgages whose interest rate exceeds the Average Prime Offer Rate by over 1.5% on the date the rate is set. Mortgages issued before 2010 are considered “higher priced” if, on the date the rate was set, it exceeded the yield rate on a Treasury security of comparable maturity by over 3%. I also categorized as “higher priced” those mortgages with payment features the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau deems high risk, which in this data included balloon-payment loans and loans with prepayment penalties. Finally, I categorized as “higher priced” those mortgages issued by lenders specializing in subprime lending, as indicated by HUD's List of Subprime Lenders.
9 I use pseudonyms throughout this article.
10 LLCs offer benefits related to tax burden and legal liability. In lower-value markets specifically, and among speculators or absentee landlords, LLCs have become a popular alternative to unincorporated sole proprietorship because they provide relative anonymity while shielding owners' personal assets from legal and financial labilities related to holding property (Travis, Citation2019).
11 This is a conservative estimate. The HMDA rate spread criterion could not be applied to fixed-rate mortgages, which did not list the interest rate in the mortgage document.
12 By summer 2023, 43 investor-owned Large Lots in the study neighborhoods had their taxes forfeited.