Ground Rent Machine: The Story of Race, Housing Inequality, and Dispossession in Baltimore

In Baltimore roughly 30 percent of all residential plots are subject to ground rent, a legacy of British feudal property law. During the early 2000s, many Baltimoreans fell behind on their ground rent due to recessionary headwinds and were "ejected" from their homes as leaseholders took ownership.

Socially situating critical GIS analysis within the historical and material relations of Baltimore reveal that ground rent — originally a tool of class dispossession — became racialized in the 1950s and 1960s and today overwhelmingly affects Black communities and low-income households.

Drawing on work by critical Marxist geographers, work on the production of decline, anti-Blackness, and property relations theory, we illustrate how people, place, power structures, and relationality produce the pernicious and predatory "ground rent machine." Telling the story of ground rent — a largely underexplored topic — illustrates how local racialized property regimes shape the geography of urban segregation and urban inequality.

This lecture is part of the Geography, Planning and Environment Brown Bag Seminar Series.