Athena Williams grew up in West Garfield Park in a family home that her late father had purchased on contract, a term she said she didn’t really understand at the time.
“All I knew was that he was paying a check once a month to this white man that came to the house. And the way it was explained to me is that this is how we were paying to buy the building,” she said. “I grew up thinking that was OK because my father made all the payments, paid it off. What I didn’t understand at the time was that was not the traditional way to do that.”
Traditional as in a bank mortgage. Land sale contracts were a form of seller financing where the seller holds the title while the buyer makes payments. The legal protections a buyer would get with a traditional mortgage don’t exist (i.e. equity). More advantageous for sellers than buyers, land sale contracts were a discriminatory practice used on Black homebuyers on the city’s South and West sides during the 1950s and ’60s. They were expected to pay high monthly payments without ever assuming ownership of the home.
“I didn’t realize that it was something bad because we were still considered rich, poor people,” Williams said. “When my father got ready to buy something, he didn’t have actual credit because (of) the way he bought the house. Everything my father did, he did with cash. He always felt that if he couldn’t pay cash for it, it didn’t make sense for us to have it. That’s how we were programmed that this land contract was OK because he was paying cash for it. He didn’t have a vehicle to help him build his credit, a vehicle to have equity — that whole equity piece our entire household missed out on because we didn’t get that.”
Without that credit and equity these families weren’t allowed to do many things that could have generated even greater family wealth. “Access to debt, the meaning and experience and opportunities of debt, can depend on, for instance, whether you can buy a home; whether your home is appreciating in value; and whether you will be able to pull equity from the home or benefit from its sale. And all of the above factors are shaped by racial disparities, and remake them in turn,” according to University of Illinois-Chicago’s Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy report, “Chicago’s Racial Wealth Gap: Legacies of the Past, Challenges in the Present, Uncertain Futures.”
Land sale contracts are the focus of Tonika Lewis Johnson’s latest art project, “Inequity For Sale” — a yearlong endeavor that aims to show how institutional racism stole generations of wealth from the Black community when homeownership was denied. The project is being done in collaboration with the National Public Housing Museum, where Lewis Johnson is doing a yearlong residency. The current work is a virtual and physical exploration of homes sold on contract in the Englewood neighborhood and the families affected, resulting in decadeslong inequity and disinvestment that is still seen and felt today. According to data in a 2019 study from Duke University, 75%-95% of homes sold to Black families in Chicago during the 1950s and ’60s were sold through land sale contracts. That number amounts to between $3.2 billion-$4 billion (in 2019 dollars) expropriated, which is still an underestimation.
As part of the multiphased project, Lewis Johnson will:
Erect land markers in front of those Englewood addresses that were involved in the land sale contract practice;
Document the stories of residents who endured the discriminatory practice (digitized audiotapes of contract buyers being interviewed in preparation for their litigation where victims talk about their migration story, how much money they came here with and not knowing that they didn’t own their home. “It’s one thing hearing the story come from us today, but to resurrect their voices … talking about how detrimental this issue is and how much it hurt them financially and in the quality of their life,” Lewis Johnson said.);
Create and host a podcast with researchers, authors and housing activists and experts about land sale contracts in Chicago;
And create an interactive map that connects the history with present-day conditions. In an attempt to honor family’s names, viewers can click on homes that are listed as land sale contracts and find out the amount of money that was stolen from families. The last three phases will live on the “Inequity For Sale” website.
Lewis Johnson said she wants to get people to participate in the conversation, contributing suggestions on how the collective result of land sale contracts should be rectified. The coup de grace of the project: Researching present-day businesses, banks that directly benefited from land sale contracts, and placing a land marker in front of one of those companies later this year.
“Hopefully, it could be in conversation with one of the institutions,” Lewis Johnson said. “‘This is what y’all did in the past, this can be part of reconciling this.’ If they don’t want to be a part of it, I’m going to put it up anyway. It’s going to be really important to have people support that.”
According to the “Inequity For Sale” website, Lewis Johnson’s goal is to campaign for a collection of the land sale contract homes to become an official city landmark, and purchase a home to convert into a community art center with a permanent exhibition for her Folded Map project.
“These are the people who got swindled out of homeownership,” Lewis Johnson said. “Regardless of what solution we come up with, we have to remember that the value of these neighborhoods needs to increase in comparison to their white counterparts. Whatever solution we create for redress, it can’t make a specific population — in this case, Black people, vulnerable again because when you segregate Black people you make them vulnerable to people who are greedy, even if they’re not racist, there are institutions or businesses that view them as a market to financially take advantage of.”
Lewis Johnson said she hopes the information put forth in “Inequity For Sale” could be used as evidence for the city’s reparations subcommittee. Tiff Beatty, the National Public Housing Museum’s director of arts, culture and public policy, said having the numbers quantified and the land markers placed in front of homes adds another layer that would make it difficult for people to ignore the issue. A Bronzeville resident, Beatty has been part of the conversations about reparations.
“Quantifying those numbers … will create further conversations,” Beatty said. “The National Public Housing Museum will then launch into other exhibits that will further advocate for change in this area. Our end goal is to really redress this as a nation because Chicago isn’t alone in some of these issues.”
Williams, executive director at Oak Park Regional Housing Center (a HUD agency that provides rental/housing counseling and financial education), is already in the conversation as a featured guest on the “Inequity For Sale” podcast. When asked if she could quantify how much equity was lost with the family home, Williams said that would be hard, given that equity grows over time.
“Had we known better and if we were able to have the equity from the property my father had, then our whole household would probably have a different outlook on life,” she said.
“I just really wanted to provide a project that takes accountability up a notch,” Lewis Johnson said. “I really wanted to help people shift blame onto who is truly accountable, which is our racist government. And if we all have a common enemy — the racist system that existed before us — then I feel like it would be easier for other races to support this specific cause because they’re not to blame, this system was put in place. They’ve benefited from it, but they didn’t create it.”
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