“At the end of May, I was seeking out people who had gone through the Large Lots Program, an initiative the city of Chicago started to sell vacant lots to nearby residents for one dollar—aka the Large Lots Program. During this search, I was introduced to Josh. We met over Zoom to discuss his views of his neighborhood and his experience with the Large Lots Program. His experiences shed a lot of light on the attitude within Chicago toward these programs and their influence on ownership in areas where the city is trying to restore it.

According to Josh, the resident who emphasized lawn care in asserting ownership over individual property, looking for a vacant lot was something at the forefront of his mind when he was looking to buy his house. He wanted a property with an adjacent vacant lot so that he could apply for the Large Lots program and acquire more land, and that’s what he did. Josh closed on his house and completed the application and expected to hear back in about 9 months. That was in the Summer of 2018. No one reached out to him to finish the process until the Summer of 2020. “It was unnecessarily long and drawn out.” he told me. “That was my experience with the program. Bureaucratic. It was a moving target.”

From Josh’s perspective, the city created the program to keep developers from purchasing the land in the “disenfranchised communities” on the South and West sides of the city and building luxury housing to drive current residents out. Still, he didn’t seem very impressed with the policy, particularly for the way he felt it enabled his less intentional neighbors. He told me an account about one of his neighbors that came across the street while he was working to clean up the “jungle” growing next to his house. “Oh, are you doing a public park?” the neighbor asked him. “This lot has never looked this good.”

“Why didn't you walk your ass across the street and clean it up?” Josh asked, clearly frustrated by the lack of initiative displayed by his neighbors as they simultaneously expected his hard work to benefit them. “I’ve got 20 other houses on the same block. Any one of them could have got the property for $1. And what I understand is one of the neighbors actually cinched the lot up at one point without paying for it.”

“Really?” I asked him.

“The city made him take the fence down, you know,” Josh said, and laughed, “Actually, that was a Chicago police detective. And he thought he could throw a fence up around a city lot and take it over.”

Josh was adamant that his hard work would come to profit himself alone. “I bet six or seven people on the block came up to me, and either said how great the lot looked or asked me if I was doing a public garden,” he said, exasperated. “You know, ain't nothing free. I ain't doing this for you. I'm doing this for me, and as soon as this is clean, I'm putting a fence around it.” Josh clearly expresses a strong sense of ownership over his individual property and is frustrated that his neighbors express a desire for communal property without the sense of ownership—in this case, willingness to invest their time and money to make a change—that would have been required to gain access to the property.

Not everyone has had a successful application. During my interview with Ruth, she explained that her neighborhood had sought out one of the vacant lots that one of her neighborhood organizations had been stewarding for years, long before ChiBlockBuilder—the successor to the Large Lots Program, also designed to sell some of the city’s vacant lots—existed. Someone had told Ruth to check with her Alderman, and if the lot was city-owned, said her organization might be considered for a purchase. During the process of trying to talk with the Alderman about their lot, things quickly got frustrating for Ruth and her team. According to Ruth, the Alderman told them no, but didn’t initially explain why. “And then when I pressed for the why…the person who represents the Aldermanic office said, ‘Because so many community organizations are interested in that lot.’” That rationale didn’t impress Ruth. “That’s a great problem to have,” she exclaimed in our interview, “Just give it to somebody!”

She explained to me that after that response, she went around the Alderman directly to the Department of Planning. She told them, “Hey, I’ve got a vision for the space. We’ve stewarded the space, but we can’t get aldermanic approval to purchase the space. What else is there to do?” After going back and forth with them for almost a year over phone calls and emails, the ChiBlockBuilder was launched, and Ruth say that the status of the lot they had been trying to acquire was “under review.”

“It feels like now you’re hiding behind technology, right? Let’s give them an app, let’s throw a status up that says under review.” Ruth said, shaking her head, “I mean, this lot has been baking in my community for 20 years. 20 years! And for a community not to have ownership, and to be able to do something with that space. To me, it’s just a slap in the face.” While Josh expressed frustration at his community’s lack of individual ownership, which stemmed from their own choices, Ruth expressed frustration in her community’s lack of communal ownership, stemming from the city’s poorly structured communication pathways. In both scenarios, this lack of ownership comes to light because of engaging with the city’s advertised efforts to increase resident ownership over vacant lots.

In another interview, I spoke with Olivia, who worked as a planner with the city, and had been involved with the ChiBlockBuilder program. Olivia explained that this issue was part of the reason they had switched from the Large Lots program to the ChiBlockBuilder: aldermen wanted more of a say in the process.

“The Large Lots program was designed in partnership with the community, but it was also done without a lot of input from Aldermen.” she said. The changes the alderman wanted had to do with the perception of land that is sold for so little, the upkeep of that land when in the hands of people who were able to get it so easily, and their desire to hold off on taking action on land that could be developed down the line. Olivia found some of the arguments convincing, such as the view residents may have of cheaply sold land. This would reinforce the negative assumptions that residents made in the previous section about the value of neighborhoods with lots of vacant land. Olivia did not agree, however, with all the decisions made on which lots could be sold, and which should be left vacant. But she explained that on matters of land sale, there was little they could do without the alderman’s support. “Not only would they have negative things to say about it, but all of our land sales…go through the city council and are voted on by the full city council.” Olivia said, 'And if someone says, ‘Don't vote for this, this goes against my wishes in my ward.’ No one's gonna vote for it. So, aldermen have, over land sales specifically, a great deal of power.” The downside of the power that aldermen are now able to exert to stop changes from happening, particularly in the case of changes started by residents, is that it detracts from residents’ ability to make change. Thus, this program fails to measure up to its ownership creating potential and counters an important component of residents’ ownership formation process.

I pressed more into the issue Ruth expressed: why were there so many lots held by the city that weren’t offered for sale to willing buyers? Olivia explained the process they had gone through to determine which lots could be sold—a process that resulted in many lots continuing to be held by the city:

“For ChiBlockBuilder, the first pass was that environmental piece. So, after the environmental review that happened in 2021-2022, we were left with about half of the inventory that was okay to sell, including sometimes lots that are right next to each other, which is frustrating, but I can only fight with these people so much. And then we also took it to the regional planning teams to say, ‘Okay, what would you like to hold back because of potential future developments or future projects. And that took out a big chunk. So, we ended up marketing about 2000 properties out of the inventory of like, 9000, potentially marketable. And so that's what's reflected on ChiBlockBuilder.”

What reason might the regional planning council or aldermen have to prevent willing buyers in their community from making use of what is otherwise an eyesore? Olivia rationalized that, “Some of it is land that the city has plans for in the future.” She paused, and then continued with a minor correction, “They have plans for or have plans to have plans for. I was beating up on the aldermen who don’t want gardens, but the planners are even worse. There's a lot of wanting to sort of keep options open. But I think that that type of attitude is why the land has languished for 40 or 50 years. And it reflects…a lack of trust in the neighborhood.” I’ll expand more on the ways trust comes to play a part in vacant land in the next chapt

This was not an alien concept to Ruth, who told me that she brought this up with the Department of Planning during their conversations:

“I explained to them, I understand the alderpersons may have long term goals, that the chambers of commerce may have long term goals, right? When we attract these businesses, that will be perfect, but I have to live here now. So, I would rather see something beautiful in that space, other than weeds, glass, and trash. Anything! And so even if they negotiated with a community organization to say something to that effect: ‘Hey, Community Organization. We’ll allow you to own the land for three years. But then after that, we have to re-evaluate because we might have new development coming.’ That's where I feel like now, I'm a player in what's happening. I'm a voice in what's happening in my community, not just we just don't hold it, because nobody's doing anything with it. And I just simply want to beautify it and use the space.”

The lack of willingness the city has shown toward collaborating with them has led to a new approach, one that for the purposes of this research I have termed “DIY action.”

To put it briefly, the Large Lots and ChiBlockBuilder programs, designed to restore ownership to residents, can instead highlight where both individual and communal ownership are lacking.  Furthermore, the struggles with prolonged bureaucratic processes and the city’s failure to effectively facilitate land acquisition deprive residents of change-making abilities, and thus a critical component of their ownership—the opposite of what the program is designed to do and leading some residents to seek out alternative modes of participation, such as DIY action.