Chicagoans know that when spring arrives, downtown bursts into color with tulips along Michigan Avenue. But this spring, it was a blaze of red tulips emerging from the soil of Washington Park that turned heads. One hundred thousand flowers grew at the corner of 53rd Street and Prairie Avenue and flowed over a city block and three corners. This strip of red made people wonder: Why is there a red line on an arbitrary street in the middle of the neighborhood?
The tulips trace the outlines of houses that once stood. As art, they call attention to redlining, an ugliness from our past — and reclaim the land as a thing of beauty and potential.
Redlining is the practice that lenders used beginning in the 1940s to designate Black neighborhoods as unsound investments. The red lines lenders drew on maps showed where Black Chicagoans could not build wealth as homeowners. Contract buying, another discriminatory practice, charged Black Chicagoans astronomical prices to buy homes and gave them no equity until they made the last payment.
Even after these practices were banned, Chicago’s history of extracting wealth from Black communities continued in the form of a complicated property tax system that allowed private tax buyers to profit off late taxes. Wealthy individuals and big banks would scoop up tax-delinquent properties but decline to bid on lower-value properties, leaving them to languish in disrepair as they dragged down values of the properties around them.
Once a property fell into the Cook County scavenger sale system, it rarely left. Over the last two decades, the scavenger sale inventory exploded to 30,000 properties; unsurprisingly, the majority were in Black neighborhoods.
In 2013, new life began to sprout in the form of rehabs and new construction in some of the city’s hardest-hit neighborhoods. The Cook County Land Bank had been formed out of the ashes of the financial crisis to break through the barriers to neighborhood development.
Bottom-up development performed by small, local developers with a focus on homeownership started to take off. Community developers looked at the same troubling canvas of vacant lots and dilapidated homes and saw what was behind the old paint: homes that, with a little time and care, could again fill neighborhoods with vibrancy and, this time, help Black Chicagoans build wealth through homeownership.
Today, the Cook County Land Bank Authority has generated significant community wealth. And because more than 90% of properties sold by the Land Bank are for homeownership, that money remains in the community. With nearly 1,700 homes redeveloped and twice that number in the pipeline, the impact is real.
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The Land Bank didn’t make this happen on its own; its mission of reclaiming the land’s potential is shared by residents, community organizations, civic leaders, elected officials, artists, activists and more.
Florence Spann maintained the vacant lots next to her home on South Loomis even though her attempts to get them from the scavenger sale were stymied. Asiaha Butler made it her life’s work to help Englewood reclaim its community, one vacant lot at a time. Bonita Harrison developed her first house with the Land Bank in 2016 and went on to rehab another 30-plus across the South Side.
Jessica Caffrey took the helm of the Land Bank this year and is building partnerships to open the door to homeownership. And Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle has spent the last 30 years of public service fighting for equity through neighborhood development. These Chicagoans are building a new vision while we remain vigilant that the tentacles of disinvestment don’t grow again.
For its first 10 years, the Land Bank has been a hack for a deeply broken system. But now, it’s time to move toward true structural reform. Last month, the Land Bank, the Cook County treasurer, the Chicago Community Trust and communities across the state all came together to pass legislation that will finally fix the scavenger sale and return wealth-generating opportunities to the very individuals the policies of systemic discrimination have so long deprived.
Today, as we observe Juneteenth, we can take inspiration from those who are fighting for a city that works for everyone. They know that accepting vacant, boarded-up houses in some neighborhoods means giving up on the people who live there. It means forgetting — or ceasing to care about — what’s possible. It means ignoring that redlining, contract buying, restrictive covenants and even the broken scavenger sale are all examples of systems that have failed people and communities for years, right in front of our eyes.
The sight of 100,000 blooming tulips where homes once stood reminds us not only that we should expect beauty in our communities but also that we should partner to cultivate it. No flowers can undo the harm suffered by generations of Chicagoans, but they can symbolize the beauty that once stood there and will — with our collective determination — stand there again.
Bridget Gainer is a Cook County Board commissioner and founder and chair of the Cook County Land Bank Authority. Amanda Williams is a Chicago-based artist and architect and the creator of the “Redefining Redlining” tulip art installation. Williams was a 2022 MacArthur Fellow.
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