As vacancy in Chicago becomes a focal point of urban planning and policy, city planners attribute vacancy to abandonment by capital and pursue a two-pronged development strategy that, on one front, seeks to efficiently revalorize land and, on another, casts vacancy as an opportunity to promote equitable redevelopment through resident-led revitalization. My dissertation finds that these initiatives mobilize conditional property to enroll residents’ unpaid labor in the maintenance of land. To investigate the historical and political-economic basis of this outcome, I pursue three related undertakings.
First, I analyze nearly ten thousand property records to trace the postwar history of 300 vacant lots in the South Side Chicago neighborhood of Englewood. I find that vacancy stems not from disinvestment but from the influx of hyperextractive investment in housing over the past seven decades: predatory mortgages, predatory tax lien purchases, and land installment contracts.
Second, to understand the forces that grant legal sanction and economic feasibility to these forms of predation, I analyze two key nodes in the political economy of housing since the turn of the 20th century: (1) the making of the modern real estate market and (2) the enforcement of municipal housing code. I find that each has been a fulcrum for property’s historical articulation with race that enables the differential valuation of land crucial for the accumulation of real estate profit. I thus situate vacancy squarely within the profit-driven historical co-production of race and property.
Third, through ethnographic research at sites where resident-led revitalization is being pursued in Englewood, I demonstrate that these efforts devolve to residents the costs of land maintenance through conditional property. The tenuous forms of ownership engendered in the name of “community empowerment” reinstate racial regimes of ownership by continuing to position residents in differentiated, conditional, and extractive relations to land.
By foregrounding vacancy’s basis in racial regimes of ownership, this dissertation illuminates the limits of ‘disinvestment’ as a discourse animating city planning practice and as a concept informing urban scholars’ analysis of socio-spatial inequalities. In this vein, the study expands political economy frameworks’ capacity to address the constitutive work of race in the appropriation of ground rent. Further, this dissertation reveals that crucial in organizing contemporary cities are not only the profit-seeking actions of real estate and finance capital typically emphasized by urban geographers but also residents’ everyday labor of revitalization, which subsidizes the creation of commodifiable landscapes.
