Social justice artist Tonika Lewis Johnson first drew public attention with the Folded Map Project, which uses Chicago’s mirrored addresses across the South and North Side divide to connect residents for vital conversations about property values and a city known for segregation. Now, with Inequity For Sale, the artist has dug deeper into the harm done to the West Englewood neighborhood—a place she’s called home throughout her life—through contract buying, a widespread practice in the 1950s and 60s that preyed upon Black homebuyers through fraudulent home lending.
At the heart of both the Folded Map Project and Inequity For Sale are maps. By putting into spatial terms the socioeconomic forces that shape Chicagoans’ houses and neighborhoods, Johnson reveals a city still reckoning with generations of violent neglect. While the Folded Map Project “visually connects residents who live at corresponding addresses on the North and South Sides of Chicago” to create cross-community conversations, Inequity For Sale homes in on the lasting effects of contract buying within just a few square miles, revealing how 3,366 Black families lost their homes.
“The expression ‘You are a product of your environment’ is how I have come to know the importance of geography in my life and its connection to race,” Johnson says. “Not just whatever people’s preconceived ideas about your neighborhood are, but the good and the bad, all inclusive.”
Johnson worked on the project during her 2021 Artist as Instigator residency with the National Public Housing Museum, which is set to start construction this fall on a permanent physical home in one of the buildings of the former Jane Addams Homes in Chicago. In the same era that large-scale public housing developments offered some Black Chicagoans a fresh start—only to be betrayed by years of organized abandonment—misleading contract sales to homebuyers cost Black Chicagoans upward of $4 billion in lost wealth, according to a 2019 study by Duke University and the University of Illinois-Chicago.
In addition to digital maps that document the thefts, and a multi-part podcast, produced by Johnson and the National Public Housing Museum called “Legally Stolen,” Johnson has created land markers planted in front of people’s homes in the community. These markers—which will soon expand to sites of Native land dispossession, and the banks that facilitated this large-scale theft—aim to remind people why we’re still bound to historical injustices that continue to harm communities today. The discriminatory housing practices perpetuated against aspiring Black homeowners parallels how land has been stolen from Indigenous peoples, Johnson explains. “It’s a throughline across time,” she says.
This article first appeared in the October issue of ARCHITECT.
