In a joint, multipart investigative series by Injustice Watch and the Investigative Project on Race and Equity, reporters pulled back the curtain on Cook County’s complex property tax foreclosure system, examining lawmakers’ and local officials’ failure to protect the generational wealth of homeowners, and, in some cases, oversee the actions of the private investors and local governments seizing tax-delinquent properties.
In the series’ anchor story, reporters Emeline Posner and Carlos Ballesteros found that more than 1,000 homeowners in Cook County lost their homes to tax foreclosure between 2019 and 2025. Those losses represent a massive transfer of wealth — $108 million — from working-class homeowners to private investors. In some cases, homeowners’ initial tax debt was as low as $110. The loss of wealth disproportionately impacted Black homeowners, especially adults over the age of 65.
In this first-of-its-kind analysis, reporters analyzed hundreds of thousands of rows of tax and assessment data, reviewed hundreds of pages of court records, and interviewed more than a dozen homeowners who lost or nearly lost their homes to tax foreclosure, as well as officials, advocates and investors. That reporting illuminated some of the reasons why homeowners, especially older homeowners of color, fall behind on tax payments in the first place, and the scarcity of resources at their disposal.
Illinois is the last state in the nation to change its laws, which currently allow homeowners to lose all their home equity during foreclosure, despite a 2023 U.S. Supreme Court ruling forbidding the practice. Data visualization and interactive elements guided readers through the racially disparate impacts of the state’s tax sale laws. An interactive map showed readers the racial demographics of community areas where the most foreclosures happened. An interactive timeline walked readers back to the 1950s, when lawmakers lobbied by investors created the current tax sale system, and through the following decades as organizers and lawyers pushed to define those same laws as harmful and unconstitutional.
When lawmakers failed to pass reforms, again, in 2025, we followed up with targeted outreach to more than 4,000 homeowners at risk of having their taxes sold in an upcoming tax sale, mailing letters containing information about the tax sale process and local resources.
And then we kept reporting, identifying abuses of power by investors and government officials who benefited from foreclosing on properties. One prominent investor in the Cook County region used a loophole in state law to allegedly defraud Cook County out of tens of millions of dollars, according to a previously undisclosed probe by a county agency. County oversight over the municipal officials who pursue foreclosure on tax-delinquent properties is also woefully inadequate, a second follow-up investigation found. The lack of regulation allowed one small-town mayor to give away foreclosed single-family homes to friends, family and political supporters.
