Property Praxis 2.0 launched in November 2024 with 10 years of data on speculative owners of property in Detroit.

Land in Detroit has many different meanings whether you claim to be an “investor” looking to profit, a community leader working to preserve space for people, or local government hoping to generate more tax revenue.

This project is for community members and no one else. The tool allows community groups to dig into who owns bulk property that is contributing to negative impacts on a neighborhood.

At least 20% of land in Detroit is owned by property speculators, defined by the amount of property they own that is not registered to an owner that lives in the same neighborhood. Property speculators benefited from the new inventory of property created by the 2007 subprime mortgage crisis, but in turn fueled the decline of these properties into blight of once intact neighborhoods.

This collaborative mapping project is not the first to examine individuals and corporations that have held large swaths of land in Detroit, but it is the first to examine the true extent of property speculation by digging into the records of shell companies and LLCs that are often used to hide ownership or skirt tax payments. Not all property speculators are bad people, but the process of speculation has far reaching negative impacts on neighborhoods and the people who live in them from loss of homes, exposure to lead poisoning, to a deterioration of overall neighborhood connectivity.