Spectacle Dispossession
Parsing through a database on parcel ownership in Detroit invariably leads to questions around land ownership.
Real estate is a risky investment. LLCs don’t typically acquire cheap buildings to make capital investments into them. Property becomes more successful in Detroit as a speculative investment. While the developer market is volatile, property values are generally projected to go up (and out of the hole of the 2008 crash left.) Online platforms have facilitated NGOs and LLCs to make their money in purely transacting bundles of properties and land. Residents often have neighboring houses with owners that have tax addresses in a different city, state, and even country. This type of predatory housing practice that dispossesses houses of their real value (people) is sadly just one aspect of the modern housing crisis.
Speculative Dispossession is a factsheet that speculates on speculators by first asking “WHO IS EXIT STRATEGY?” Amid thousands of comically named shell companies in a database of owners was suspicious Exit Strategy LLC and its variant LLCs. Most of the hundreds of properties owned by Exit Strategy are dilapidated. Research can only uncover so much. There is not much to discover about Exit Strategy other than an address for a CPA firm in Farmington Hills, MI. Speculation follows research questions: Who is Exit Strategy? What are the benefits of this method of business? Where is the contingency?
Information was sourced from Detroit Open Data Portal and Michigan LARA COFS.
size: letter
copies: 30
ink: riso and inkjet
