Tonika Lewis Johnson had a beautiful ‘80s childhood in Greater Englewood on Chicago’s South Side. She made her first friends, rode her bike with them and played outside every day. She would go with her friend, Raymond, to the corner store for cookies, pickles and chips.
Then Johnson began high school. She enrolled in a selective program in the diverse Lane Tech High School fifteen miles north of her neighborhood. Every morning she would have to be at the bus stop by 5:45 am just to make it to school by 8am.
On her daily train commute she would look out the window, listening to her Walkman. The long journey across Chicago submerged her into the city’s psyche, into understanding the connection between race, geography and Chicago’s segregation. This was in 1993, so there was no GPS, no cell phones, “you had to know the streets,” Johnson says.
Then adult life happened. She went to college, got married, had kids, and then realized how difficult it was to afford buying a home in Chicago, so she returned to Greater Englewood. Here the home values had been gradually decreasing over the last three decades, beginning when Johnson was a child. First, white residents moved out, and then white-owned businesses left the neighborhood, thereby removing a strong business corridor. Schools were not getting the funding they needed, and with no jobs, crime increased. And once the neighborhood “was labeled to be bad because of gun violence or crimes, the value of houses started dropping because people didn’t want to move here anymore,” explains Johnson when we meet over Zoom.
Over the course of these 30 years, the homes lost a significant amount of their value (and so most homeowners lost a significant portion of their most important asset), all due to issues rooted in past discriminatory practices.
Many houses in Johnson’s neighborhood were abandoned, and the socio-political plight of neighbors was precarious; no other neighborhood in Chicago has territories that belong to five different local councils. It makes any significant change too difficult to coordinate as six different aldermen represent the neighborhood at the mayor’s office. Johnson began to organize gatherings with neighbors to understand why in a predominantly Black neighborhood, homeownership among Black residents was so low at 24%. The discussions and research that resulted illuminated the path for this artist to become a housing maverick, to begin to undo the harm of wealth’s extraction from her Black community.
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Tonika Johnson is not a follower of norms; her work doesn’t fit into the straitjacket of disciplinary silos. That may be the success of her work. She began documenting the dozens of homes in her neighborhood sold to aspiring Black homeowners in the ’50s and ‘60s through predatory practices. Black families were denied traditional mortgages and had to accept risky land sale contracts that required them to pay exorbitant monthly payments–and if they missed even one payment, they would lose everything without getting any equity back.
From this research, she created the provocative art installation “Inequity for sale” in 2021 and curated 12 big yellow signs in front of the homes that were legally stolen for Black homeowners in Greater Englewood. The signs displayed their names of the victims of “a widespread land sale contract scam” that has never been brought to justice.
The installation got the attention of the public. And fortuitously, Johnson met Melvin Walls, owner of one of the landmark houses who was struggling with his vacant home for many years. “Walls actually introduced me to another whole issue. Longtime Black homeowners in my neighborhood can’t afford home repairs,” says Johnson. They have allocated their last penny to pay the mortgages, and meanwhile insurance companies don’t cover the repairs because the value of the homes are so low.
In 2019, a groundbreaking report called The Plunderer of Black Wealth in Chicago: New Findings on the Lasting Toll of Predatory Housing Contracts published by Duke University showed that 75% to 95% of homes were sold to Black families in Chicago under those contracts during the ’50s and ’60s. The report led by researcher Amber S. Hendley draws connections between those predatory practices and the dilapidated or vacant lots in Johnson’s Englewood neighborhood. Black homeowners were not able to build the necessary equity to properly maintain their homes.
Johnson used this report as the basis of her work, coming up with the unorthodox idea of applying for arts funding to help Melvin Walls and other long-time Englewood homeowners repair their homes. “Well I thought, if you make a house pretty, that’s public art,” she says with a smile. Johnson knew that she was stretching the definition of public art: typically a mural, a sculpture, a garden. But she wanted to challenge this limited benchmark, and especially so, when the grant was explicitly asking to fund a public art that would uplift the history of a neighborhood impacted by racist housing practices.
“These houses are like artifacts. I want to help their owners to repair them because they are proof of racism and the consequence of segregation. And if you can help the victims of these discriminatory housing practices to heal and be able to decorate their home in a way that’s beautiful, I think that is public art.”
Luckily, there were some visionaries among the people judging grant applications, who saw the potential in Johnson’s “UnBlocked Englewood” project, and granted the funding. Johnson explained how she partnered with the Chicago Bungalow Association, researcher Amber S. Hendley, and the Englewood Arts Collective “to beautify the block.”
With the funding, they have provided critical repairs to 12 homes – roof, electrical and plumbing work. “Still we have 12 more to go. That’s why we’re fundraising $500K to continue repairs for vacant lots on the 65th block of South Aberdeen,” says Johnson. So in August this year she started a crowdfunding campaign to restore the denied equity to homeowners while transforming the Englewood neighborhood one home at a time.
What started as an artistic work could reach state of the art urban policy. Johnson is using her project UnBlocked Englewood to create a case study that can be offered to policymakers with a view to influencing local governments’ decisions. “That’s why researcher Hendley was so excited to be part of the UnBlocked Englewood; because this project falls in line with one of her proposed solutions to minimize the racial homeownership and wealth gap by investing in existing Black and Brown homeowners,” explains Johnson. Home repairs is one of the mechanisms.
Hendley has helped Johnson to quantify how much needs to be reinvested into the block, in other words, the equity gap discriminatory practices have caused Englewood homeowners. Johnson drops a number: roughly $60,000 per home.
Hendley’s research also breaks the old myth that homeownership builds generational wealth. That is only the case if the home is in a neighborhood that is going to increase in value and you have been able to save for general maintenance. But this is rarely the case in Black neighborhoods; the financial situation of existing homeowners is often unstable, and “that actually makes the neighborhood so vulnerable to gentrification,” says Johnson, as gentrification has become a paramount issue in Chicago.
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Johnson also wants to demonstrate that supporting home repairs is a meaningful way to offset gentrification. She is not against neighborhood development; on the contrary she admits that “Everybody wants new coffee shops or restaurants in their neighborhood, because it brings people to your neighborhood and it adds value.” Rather, she says she is “using the UnBlocked Englewood project to show that if you invest in the people who already live in a neighborhood – both homeowners and renters – you give them the ability to not be priced out, and you help them build equity.”
If the city would help homeowners to pay their home repairs, these homeowners could save money to pay for the potential increase in property taxes if the neighborhood starts improving. If the city helps renters, then it creates an opportunity for them to become homeowners. The result is a strong base of people who already live in the neighborhood and are not negatively affected by any development. “I feel UnBlocked Englewood is demonstrating a pathway to make that happen,” says Johnson.
I wonder if those long train rides were a prerequisite for Johnson’s perspicacious eye. Here, in my own town on the other side of the Atlantic, the law gives home developers and homeowners in Munich a carte blanche to increase rental prices if the house undergoes structural works in the building. This has led to a speedy gentrification of neighborhoods as many tenants cannot afford the rent increases, and are effectively priced out.
Last month, the City Council of Chicago just passed an anti-gentrification ordinance to protect housing in rapidly gentrifying parts of the Northwest Side. The legislation builds off two pilot programs launched in 2021 that protect two-, three- and four-flats in some neighborhoods. It has introduced a demolition charge for developers for tearing down single-family homes and multi-unit buildings. Under the new legislation, demolition charges are $20,000 per unit and $60,000 per building.
Johnson admits that “it’s difficult for our city to create a policy or system in the way that we’re trying to do it. But I’m hoping that our work will show city officials how it can be done, and more importantly, provide them with the financial data to help this one block.” She would also like to expand her project to the West Side of Chicago that was the epicenter of these predatory practices in the ‘50s and ‘60s. And obviously, beyond home repairs, Johnson is advocating for justice and restoration, for holding those financial institutions accountable. But she adds “We can’t wait for reparations, we have to help people now.”
