An enduring scar left behind by 1940s-era redlining languishes at the block of South Spaulding Street and West 16th Street in Chicago’s North Lawndale neighborhood on the West Side.
Across the street from a boarded-up greystone, foot-high grass covers vacant lots strewn with trash. Some weed-covered parcels serve as makeshift parking. In all, the block comprises 43 properties, and as a new report from Cook County Treasurer Maria Pappas states, 19 of those lots are vacant — many of them abandoned for decades.
The block is a microcosm for the blight that long ago metastasized across Chicago’s South and West sides, a blight that began with the corrosive practice of redlining and is perpetuated today by other examples of systemic dereliction, like the ongoing, massive disparity in how much banks lend to the North Side versus communities on the South and West sides.
And, as the treasurer’s report points out in painstaking detail, Cook County’s decades-old reliance on scavenger sales to return vacant and abandoned properties to productive use has badly failed South and West Side communities.
Vacant lots are not just eyesores. They’re red flags for disinvestment and a neighborhood’s disconnection from the rest of the city, particularly from City Hall. Walk through a community pockmarked with vacant lots and abandoned two-flats, and you’re likely walking through a neighborhood mired in joblessness, gun violence and steady population loss.
It’s a grinding cycle of neglect that imperils not just the South and West sides, but all of Chicago. No city can thrive when whole swaths of it fall into decay. Rust Belt cities like Detroit and Cleveland serve as real-life cautionary tales.
As Pappas’ report reveals, the county’s scavenger sale program simply hasn’t measured up. Why a scavenger sale? It’s intended to get an abandoned parcel redeveloped and back taxes on it paid. Such properties make it to the sale’s auction list if they’ve had three or more years of unpaid taxes within the last 20 years.
Private buyers can submit bids for a tax lien on the property. If the original owners don’t pay the back taxes along with other penalties, the lienholder can take ownership of the property. Cook County and the Cook County Land Bank Authority, which acquires foreclosed, vacant or abandoned homes and other buildings and sells them to local developers, also can pursue properties on the list.
Pappas’ team looked at scavenger sales from 2007 to 2019 and found that only about 8% of the 51,312 properties up for bid were eventually acquired by new owners. That’s around 1 in 13 — not a rate that’s going to move the needle on restoring properties to the tax rolls.
The report also examined the link between scavenger sales and redlining — the federal government-sanctioned practice in the 1940s of denying Blacks access to home loans on the premise that they were deemed a financial risk. Pappas’ team took maps from that era delineating the redlined Chicago neighborhoods, and overlaid them with current data on scavenger sale locations.
The result: more than half of the properties offered at the 2022 scavenger sale were in redlined areas, and another 40% were in areas designated by the maps as being “yellow-lined,” or at risk of being redlined.
Among the report’s conclusions: The scavenger sale “is inadequate to the task of restoring thousands of distressed properties in communities that have long suffered from housing discrimination, from redlining to scant mortgage lending and below-value mortgage appraisals in minority communities.”
Pappas offers a battery of solutions that we think the Illinois General Assembly and the Cook County Board should take up.
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She recommends changing state law to eliminate scavenger sales in Cook County, or at least make them optional. Instead, Cook County could do what nearly every other county in Illinois does — rely on a “trustee program” in which the county secures tax liens on properties not sold at annual tax sales. If property owners pay up their back taxes and penalties, they keep the property and the revenue gets parsed out to taxing bodies. If the property owner balks at paying up, the county trust gets the parcel, clears all liens and puts up the property for auction, sale or giveaway.
Pappas also suggests making it easier for property owners to make amends by lowering the interest rate on delinquent tax payments and allowing them to make partial payments on tax liens rather than the current requirement for the full amount in one lump sum. And she thinks it’s time for the county to set up a user-friendly website with a downloadable list of all properties made available through tax lien sales. Given the arcane nature of the world of tax liens, the website should feature easy-to-navigate tutorials.
Pappas’ recommendations are common sense and far from onerous to apply. All it takes is some gumption on the part of Springfield, Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle and the county board.
Reforming how vacant and abandoned properties are handled in Cook County will never erase the generational damage wrought by redlining and lending discrimination. But it can serve as a key cog in revitalizing South and West Side neighborhoods that have themselves been abandoned — by government leaders at every level who view the plight of those communities as somebody else’s problem.
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