How did a bustling commercial strip in a Black Chicago neighborhood lose most of its businesses and buildings? It wasn’t an accident.

On the left is what Madison Street looked like in the early 1970s. On the right is what it looks like today.

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First, some context: In the ’50s and ’60s, grocery stores, banks and restaurants lined Madison Street in East Garfield Park. It was called “the Heart of the West Side.”

Today, it’s lined with acres of vacant land. A lot of that property has sat undeveloped for decades.

The green areas on this map are all vacant properties as of 2015 (the latest data available).

Now, you might know that Madison Street was the epicenter of the uprisings that followed Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in 1968. About 100 buildings burned btwn Damen and Pulaski; some businesses left the neighborhood after.

But the vacancies you see today didn’t result from one burst of violence 52 years ago. In fact, it took a long time for the street to get this way.

One block helps tell that story.

Remember this picture?

That's Madison between California and Francisco avenues.

The lots there that used to have businesses and apartments on them. The buildings survived the riots, yet had mostly disappeared by 1990.

Since then, the land has had several owners. None of them have built on it.

After piecing together the history of these lots from property records and news clips, I reached out to past and current owners. I wanted to understand why they left the land vacant.

I talked to a lawyer whose clients owned the land in the ’90s. They were “tax buyers,” meaning they acquired land from the county by settling the tax debts on delinquent property. Then they flipped the lots for profit.

Nothing got built.

The next owner was a developer. He said he wanted to build on the site, but he never did. He paid $250K for the land in 2004 and sold it 12 years later for $400K.

Today, the land belongs to a suburban man who owns a meatpacking company. He’s never built on it either; instead, he’s used it as collateral to get bank loans.

One time, he actually used the land to secure a construction loan. But…

he used the money to refurbish a warehouse in Archer Heights, 8 miles away.

When I was a real estate reporter, sources in the industry would tell me about cycles in the market. If a neighborhood was down, it was only a matter of time before it turned back up again.

It's been many cycles. I wonder how much longer Madison Street will have to wait.

So how did lots like these become vacant in the first place?

You can read the full story here. https://www.propublica.org/article/disinvested-how-government-and-private-industry-let-the-main-street-of-a-black-neighborhood-crumble

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