Abstract Between 2014 and 2020, Chicago's Large Lots program sold hundreds of city‐owned lots for one dollar to property owners across the city's South and West Sides. While planners invoked histories of racialized dispossession to legitimize this new land market, they restricted participation to property owners, thereby naturalizing the configurations of power and capital produced by those histories while enabling their beneficiaries to acquire discounted land for speculation. Through an analysis of the property records of the land sold to investors and the properties that qualified investors for it, I trace a throughline from the predatory dispossession orchestrated by subprime lending in the early 2000s to contemporary economies of speculation on the South and West Sides of Chicago. Situating the flows of value and relations of ownership engendered by Large Lots squarely within the afterlives of subprime collateral, I challenge the historical closures that recast state‐sanctioned land speculation as resident empowerment. Against these closures, I consider the possibilities and limits of the property registry as an archive in which to trace the ties that bind layered histories of dispossession to contemporary geographies of speculation and as a site from which to reassert the political demands these histories make in the present.
Rea Zaimi (Tue,) studied this question.