Mapping Detroit: How much land in the city is owned by land speculators?

Property Praxis 2.0 launched in November 2024 with 10 years of data on speculative property owners in Detroit. Property speculation is the process of buying land or property with the primary goal of making a profit through a future sale of that property. 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.

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, which populated the Wayne County tax foreclosure auction rolls, and in turn fueled the decline of these properties and produced blight in once intact neighborhoods. Over the last 10 years, John Hantz has been the top property speculator every year since 2017. Other property speculators have lost the bulk of their land holdings through legal settlements like Steve Hagerman and Michael Kelly. Still others have persisted like Dennis Kefallinos and Matthew Tatarian. 

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. 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.

This is part of a series from the unofficial cartographer of Detroit, Alex B. Hill, a self-described “data nerd and anthropologist” who combines mapping, data, and analytics with storytelling and human experience. He is the founder of DETROITography and author of “Detroit in 50 Maps" and “Great Lakes in 50 Maps.”