Session Summary: Property
For the second session of the Washington Park In Our Time discussion series, the group welcomed guests Amanda Williams and Ghian Foreman to consider the role and meaning of property in Washington Park, particularly through the 1980’s and 90’s. Building on the work shared by Amanda and Ghian and memories of neighborhood life, the group came to focus on underlying questions including: how does property function in Washington Park and the broader South Side? Who has been able to own property? What does it mean to restore property, and who gets to restore it? Property – understood in different moments as a home, a lot, a block, a sense of ownership, and a connection across space– was often experienced as care and a responsibility to one’s community. The neighborhood itself was a function of the people on the block, a set of neighbors that checked in on one another, a sense of “where I live” and “where I stay.” Whether it was one block or across several blocks where neighborhoods functioned, property served as a shared connection to the everyday politics and rules of the street. Along with the care shown through “nosy neighbors”, our conversation led us to the lineage that property represents, the connection passed through inheritance from one generation to another, a way of building collective staying power amidst transience.
Rose pointed us back to the timeline of Washington Park, highlighting the structural transformation of development in the neighborhood and questioning the University of Chicago’s role in this story. While in some ways the role of the University as a real estate giant has been “taken for granted” on the South Side, as Rose mentioned, the community area boundaries invented by sociologists at the University in the 1920’s and land use agreements of the mid-twentieth century continue to play a significant role in the geography of development in the neighborhood. In recognizing these historical geographies, Ghian encouraged us to think about how we might also be better able to map out investment strategies for Black land ownership that build on existing knowledge of Washington Park – where infrastructure exists, where the University might try to move next. The strategies could become a way of redefining a place on its own terms, and as Sheila reflected, of bringing out the best parts of the neighborhood.
The question of restoration also lingered at the edges of our conversation, particularly regarding who has agency to claim the act of ‘restoration’ on the South Side. Even as the University of Chicago has suggested that their work serves this purpose, as Harold pointed out early in the conversation, there remains a larger suspicion that today’s policies still look a lot like old plans – of urban renewal and induced blight. Large questions remain about what actions can be taken to work towards a sense of Black Space - place that genuinely reflects the specific feeling of neighborhoods on the South Side, neighborhoods that don’t look like any other neighborhood in Chicago.
Turning back to Amanda and Ghian’s experience with “Redefining Redlining,” an installation highlighting the footprint of vacancy through 100,000 red tulips, our conversation focused on building symbols of investment into the community beyond the affordable housing projects that find the hard-to-get Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC). By developing a new generation of caretakers, working towards a broader “property intelligence” or a set of “vantage points,” in Amanda’s view we could generate a vision for young people to emphasize their own agency in the future of the neighborhood. The new vision is as grounded and practical as it is ambitious. It’s just as focused on bringing “a little more economy” to the neighborhood through entrepreneurial and traditional investment, as it is on exploring creative models of collective land ownership and mutual reliance. Here, property reemerges not just as an asset but as lineage: a forward-looking commitment to the kind of community we want to belong to and the built environment we aspire to create.