Abstract
In The City after Property, Sara Safransky takes the reader to postindustrial Detroit in the 2010s, a place where—paradoxically—the city has too much land while residents continue to be dispossessed of theirs. Drawing on interviews, participant observations, historical research, media analysis, and a related participatory action research project, Safransky takes this ostensible paradox as her starting point to try to understand “what happens when a private property system fails and how people endeavor to put it back together or reorder it” (p. xv). The question is prescient: by 2011, 1/3 of Detroit's land was classified as vacant or abandoned—leaving the city's tax base in dire straits—and yet, through instruments like the tax foreclosure auction, the state continued to dispossess tens of thousands of families annually. From this vantage point, Safransky says she “realized the very idea of ‘abandoned’ land needed rethinking” (p. 5).
In Detroit, as in other cities, the failure of the private property system cannot be de-linked from the way property regimes have historically been racialized, something Safransky traces lucidly in a chapter that surveys successive waves of in-migration, segregation, urban renewal, urban rebellion, and the rise of neoliberalism as they touch down in majority-Black Detroit. By the 2010s, Detroit, like many other cities, “found itself increasingly beholden to the interests of speculative finance and reliant on nonprofits and foundations to support social services” (p. 54). While Detroit was hit by the subprime mortgage crisis, it was the aggressive pursuit of tax foreclosures that accounted for the majority of owner dispossession by the time Safransky conducted her fieldwork, further hollowing out what was once a thriving site of Black homeownership.
Throughout the book, Safransky analyzes a number of state responses to the property crisis. For example, as foreclosures progressed apace, the state promoted urban homesteading (but only for the deserving poor). Planners also implemented a “White Picket Fence Program,” which aimed to dispose of surplus city land by selling adjacent lots to current property owners at low cost and incentivizing those owners to fence off the lots (in what Safransky rightly hails as a “performance” of property [p. 94]). The state's other major effort was a ‘rightsizing’ program, conducted under the auspices of the Detroit Works Project, which proposed to shut off major public services for city neighborhoods deemed extraneous, yet where thousands of people still resided. In this process, planners effectively re-animated the ghost of HOLC's redlining maps by creating valuation maps wherein “entire neighborhoods could be deemed too risky for private investment and, in some cases, too risky for the delivery of public services based on their perceived ‘market strength’” (p. 163). As plans progressed and public backlash ensued, city officials disavowed the language of rightsizing, swapping it out instead for discourses of urban ‘sustainability.’ Such state programs, Safransky argues, not only represent a state devolution of care, but also neglect the forms of grassroots caretaking that were already happening in Detroit, wherein neighborhood groups would resist state abandonment by fixing up vacant homes and lots, reconnecting critical infrastructures like electrical or water systems, participating in economies of hustle, or developing local cultural institutions to sustain communal life.
Despite local political resistance, Detroit was put under emergency fiscal management by the Michigan governor in 2013 and ultimately declared bankruptcy. Safransky juxtaposes the financial accounting that occurred as part of this official process—the counting of municipal debts—with another form of accounting: that performed by the Metropolitan Detroit Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Racial Inequality, which investigated the historical roots of racial inequality in the city. While the commission ultimately failed, Safransky argues that the ensuing resentments comprise a form of “moral protest [that] illuminates structures of oppression that cause harm and suggests that breaking from them requires more than reconciliation” (p. 120).
Throughout her analysis of urban histories and policies related to the intersecting crises of debt, vacancy, and abandonment in Detroit, Safransky diligently shows that the breakdown of property regimes is as much a cultural as a material phenomenon, a crisis that invokes moral reckonings (who deserves property and why?) as well as particular imaginaries of the city as a space that is empty, decaying, or wild. In different ways, all of these metaphors harken back to colonial discourses, which erase current occupants to justify territorial expansion. Here, maps and other discursive tools do not merely reflect a new urban order but “are also instrumental in its making” (p. 140). Such official representations directly contradict the grounded experiences of residents: as Safransky poignantly writes, “It is hard, after all, to see ruined buildings romantically, vacant land opportunistically, or people as nonexistent when you make your home among them” (p. 142).
Ultimately, Safransky concludes that “abandonment is an active political project” (p. 197). In this vein, The City after Property offers theoretical insights that transcend the immediate case study at hand to illuminate the relationship between property, abandonment, and state policy more generally. For example, I write about property in a very different context: in Chicago's late-stage public housing in the latter decades of the twentieth century. I argue, as others have before me, that the state systematically abandoned Chicago's public housing and its poor, majority-Black residents as a matter of policy until, deemed hopeless, the spaces were dismantled and privatized in the early 2000s. Their occupants were dispersed throughout the city, but most were pushed to other low-income, majority-Black neighborhoods, seemingly defeating the integrationist aspirations of policymakers. Safransky's work shows, as I hope mine will as well, that abandonment is not something that happens when policymakers take their hands off the wheel (i.e., public housing residents were not ‘forgotten’ or ‘left behind’ as such), but is a symptom of status quo policymaking working as intended, an active political project that serves racial capitalism at the expense of the race- and class-subjugated urban residents. Abandonment is thus organized, as theorists like David Harvey (1989), Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2008), and Brenna Bhandar (2018) have all argued, and Safransky's work helps us understand exactly how.
Like Detroit, Chicago's now-destroyed public housing is another site that is “useful for thinking about the modern property form because [it] upend[s] its presumed fixity” (p. 12). As in Detroit, the dispossession of Chicago's public housing tenants was not met quietly, but was instead a “violent and complex affair” (p. 12). Thus, Safransky's work is helpful for thinking through the “politics of abandonment” that led to the degraded conditions of late-20th-century public housing in Chicago and similar cities, where “rather than seeing capital as simply having moved on, leaving so-called abandoned cities in its wake,” we can instead understand “how racial capitalism is produced and reproduced through the conjoining of race and property, as well as through the state's role in capacitating the factors of production that enable its mobility” (p. 17). Abandonment is thus “intrinsic to the ownership model itself,” rather than aberrant (p. 15). In Chicago, the public housing buildings marked as “failing” by the Department of Housing and Urban Development by the late 1990s were not empty, but were full of people who had been systematically abandoned by the state in much the same ethos—if not by the same tactics—as the Black residents of Detroit. The response was to target these same communities as “a fix for value extraction and accumulation” via the destruction of their state-owned homes and the redevelopment of their living spaces as private properties (p. 17).
In my own research, I focus on the role of police—an omnipresent actor in Chicago's public housing, yet one that has been under-interrogated for its role in public housing's demise (Hamlin, 2023, in progress). For Safransky, police are not at the heart of the story, though she acknowledges that increased policing and surveillance go hand-in-hand with the “defense of real estate values” in Detroit and elsewhere (p. 159). My own work foregrounds this dimension of state violence and shows how police are central, rather than incidental, actors in what Safransky rightly terms the “constitutive relationship between property and abandonment” (p. 21). As I argue, this happened in Chicago through the state's systematic (though not conspiratorial) deployment of police to protect property over people in public housing (Hamlin, 2023, in progress). When police failed to do either, the state wrote off public housing—rather than policing—as a failed policy, reconfiguring public housing properties in ways that better served the interests of racial capitalism and the real estate state (Stein, 2019).
While much of the literature on housing and urban property in the contemporary United States rightfully examines cities where affordability is the major issue, leading to rising tides of street homelessness, evictions, and other forms of housing injustice, Safransky's book fills a gap by studying a city where the challenges look much different: where vacancy and deindustrialization, rather than gentrification per se, are the major challenges of the day. And yet, theorizing from Detroit, the conclusions she draws about abandonment, property, and repair apply to struggles for housing justice more broadly: that “neoliberal urbanism must be analyzed as part of a longer evolution of racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and slavery,” that scholars must attend to how “discourses of abandonment shape urban planning and governance decisions,” and that “land struggles . . . illuminate how modern property organizes abandonment as well as alternative ways of conceiving of personhood, rights, and sovereignty” (p. 7). As The City after Property reminds us, land is, everywhere, central to struggles for liberation.
