Aaron Petcoff
New York magazine@ughitsaaron
Hi everyone!
My name is Aaron Petcoff.
I'm a web developer at _New York_ magazine.
I want to tell you about a little project I worked on, a critical research project into housing in Detroit called "Property Praxis."
Property Praxis includes an interactive map I built in Javascript that visualizes speculative investment in Detroit. Our research revealed widespread speculation in Detroit housing which has tremendous consequences for local residents–by encouraging blight, housing inequality, and segregation.
Housing in Detroit
Property Praxis
Wrap up
So during this talk I'm going to talk a bit about Detroit's housing crisis to provide some context for this project.
Then I'll discuss how I built the map and then wrap up with some brief sort of takeaways.
Housing in Detroit
Detroit's long been able to grab people's attention. Of course, early in the 20th century, Detroit gave the world the car, fundamentally reshaping cities and whole urban landscapes.
Detroit held on to people's imagination through it's music, through the Motown sound of Diana Ross…
Iggy Pop's gritty rock-and-roll
and, then there's, you know, these guys, I guess…
Detroit is again beginning to capture people's attention and imaginations through a boom in new local investment.
According to the media, Detroit is in the midst of an urban rennaisance.
This idea is so common and widespread that when I moved here people kept telling me I was "moving in the wrong direction."
But as probably anyone can guess, this new development is uneven. Plenty of neighborhoods aren't seeing any benefit from this of new investment. In fact, I would suggest that much of the new development comes at the expense of some of Detroit's poorest communities.
The media representation of Detroit tends to present the city as a sort of crosshatching of economically resurgent neighborhoods consisting of gourmet cocktail bars and abandoned ghost towns.
[Detroit is] a battlefront in the eternal war between man and nature. But when humans abandoned half the city, nature set up its occupying forces in deserted buildings and every structure is a target to be taken over or taken down.
Weather Channel
Consider this quote from a video about Detroit produced by the Weather Channel.
"[Detroit is] a battlefront in the eternal war between man and nature. But when humans abandoned half the city, nature set up its occupying forces in deserted buildings and every structure is a target to be taken over or taken down."
There's lots of stuff like this. It's like they think Detroit is, like, the Land of the Lost or just reverting
As many as 50,000 stray dogs roam the streets and vacant homes of bankrupt Detroit, replacing residents, menacing humans who remain and overwhelming the city’s ability to find them homes or peaceful deaths.
Bloomberg
(There aren't…)
But I really believe some journalists almost think that. Like, check out this report from Bloomberg about the town being overrun by stray dogs.
On the surface, it might appear that Detroit is returning to some kind of natural state. When you see a landscape filled with abandoned houses choked by their overgrown front lawns.
"All science would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence of things directly coincided."
But as someone once wrote, if the appearance of things told you everything you needed to know, there'd be no need for science.
That was Karl Marx.
Put simply, while it might appear as if Detroit is being reclaimed by nature as a result of widespread abandonment, underlying the shaping of Detroit's physical and geographical landscape are social-economic relationships.
Detroit has the highest rate of evictions and foreclosure than any other major U.S. city.
Detroit sold 30,000 homes at auction in 2015
Almost a third of the homes were still occupied
(That's down from over 67,000 homes sold in 2014)
While many investors and new residents are being attracted to the city with new tax breaks and living incentives.
This contrasts starkley, however, with the struggle that many older Detroit residents face. Detroit is 83% African American and 38% of its population lives below the poverty line. Many residents struggle to pay their property taxes and stand the risk of losing their homes to tax foreclosure.
Property Praxis
Property Praxis groew out of a need to understand this crisis and an interest in seeing how this crisis shapes the city.
We were heavily inspired by projects like the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project out of San Francisco that maps similar patterns of dispossession resulting from the Bay Area tech boom.
Who are the speculators?
Three or more parcels in area in which the owner does not have a taxable address
Ownership of a large number of parcels in varying conditions and disuse
Single vacant or abandoned property held by an owner with an out-of-state or international address
A residential property that serves as a taxable address for multiple owners with three or more holdings in the city
For our research we used four critera to define speculative activity
Three or more parcels in area in which the owner does not have a taxable address
Ownership of a large number of parcels in varying conditions and disuse
Single vacant or abandoned property held by an owner with an out-of-state or international address
A residential property that serves as a taxable address for multiple owners with three or more holdings in the city
Collaborators on this project–whose background is predominantly in critical geography–looked through parcel data made publicly availble by the city for properties that matched one or more of these critera.
Often times speculators will hide anonymously behind shell companies, and since the people who led research on Property Praxis are, like, basically crazy, they then went out and tracked down actual names for the LLCs and shell corporations listed as the owner of each parcel.
We wound up with something close to 70,000 parcels.
One out of every five parcels in Detroit
That's approximatly one of every five parcels, or 20% of total parcels, in the city.
Almost all of these parcels are purchased from the county's tax foreclosure auction, sometimes for prices as low as $500. Once purchased, most of these properties simply sit removed from their surrounding community. Homes are left to rot while the investor hopes to flip the home for a profit.
If the former occupant offers to buy the home back, the investor often asks for an inflated price.
For instance, when one 96-year-old resident was unknowingly foreclosed on in 2012, her home was sold to a speculator for only $1,300. The speculator then offered to sell the home back to the woman (rather than evict her) for more than $19,000. Luckily, the woman was able to work out a deal and gain support from the local community and was able to buy her home back for $13,000.
I don't know much about geography
(But I do know a little about Javascript)
Folks conducting this research contacted me when they started playing with the idea of visualizing the results of their reseach on the web.
At the moment I didn't know anything about geography. I still don't, really.
But I do know a little bit about Javascript and was eagerly waiting an opportunity to work on visualizations with Leaflet.
Property Praxis
I used Ember to manage the front end, handle routing, and grabbing data from Carto which I used to serve up rasterized images of all the parcels in our data.
Then we use Github Pages to serve up the site, statically. There's no backend code. This also means that the project is very easy to fork and customize with your own data.
with your own data
((FOLLOW THE LINK TO GITHUB!))
Plenty of cities make parcel and ownership information available on their local open data portals, hypothetically one could grab the data, run a python script that filters parcels out based on their defining criteria for speculation, upload it to CartoDB and go.
I wanted to do try to do this with parcel data from Philly but wasn't able to do it in time.
When I presented this recently at the Allied Media Conference in Detroit, folks from Boston, Baltimore, and Cleveland were interested forking the project to create their own speculation maps.
Maps can help us act by reducing complexity and helping us understand how the world around us is shaped
Aaron Petcoff
New York magazine@ughitsaaron
