A 99-year lease on 440 acres of Chicago lakefront, and nobody has read it

Blue Owl kept the ground. Related Midwest and CRG are building on land they will never own. The lease runs to 2124 and the terms are not public.

Chicago · South Chicago · 16 September 2026

Standing brief · The South Works deal

Don't follow the man. Follow the money.

They are building a quantum computing campus on the ground where my people worked. Four hundred and forty acres on the lake, dark since April 10, 1992. Seventeen plans came and died there. This one is going up. Before you get to what it is, look at who owns the dirt underneath it, because that part never made the rendering.

Nobody sold the ground

In 2025 the real estate arm of Blue Owl Capital, a private credit firm, paid U.S. Steel about $75 million for the old South Works land. It then handed control of that land to Related Midwest and CRG for about $58 million, structured as a 99-year ground lease. Related bought a little over $3 million of land straight from U.S. Steel on top of that.

Seventy-five million out. Fifty-eight million back. That is not a flip. Blue Owl is down about seventeen million on paper and holds the deed until 2124.

The dirt was never the product. The lease is.

The Bureau of Corporations looked at U.S. Steel and put the actual plant at around $676 million and the securities at around $1.40 billion. The mills were real. The paper stacked on top of them was the business.

Same move, same ground. The land is real. The ninety-nine years of paper sitting on it is the business. Related Midwest and CRG are pouring the foundation, running the cranes, signing the tenants, and building on land they will never own. Nobody outside the deal has read the terms.

The dirt

U.S. Steel ran that yard from 1882 to 1992. A hundred years of mill waste went into that soil.

The developer and the state EPA have leaned on a 1997 report that found the site safe. Residents have been asking how a report older than most of the people working on the site settles the question. The developer enrolled in the state's voluntary cleanup program, and at the end of last year the state EPA approved a new remediation for the full 440 acres. This past July, a group of University of Chicago scientists called for construction to stop over contamination and energy.

The company that made the mess sold the land and left. It is not paying for the cleanup. It has not been on that ground in thirty-four years. Whoever holds the 99-year lease now owns what is in the soil, too.

The vote they took off the ballot

In December 2025 a group called Southside Together went door to door in three precincts across South Shore, South Chicago and the Bush. They wanted a nonbinding question on the March ballot. Should the alderman, the mayor and the governor halt this project.

Nonbinding. An opinion poll with a legal envelope.

They turned in more than 329 signatures. The election board confirmed the petition met the signature requirement. In January the board rejected it anyway. Organizers were told they could hire an election attorney and appeal. They said they could not afford one. They were told to come back in November and collect every signature again.

City Council approved the project three times in three weeks, unanimously each time. The alderman for the ward said out loud that business as usual would not be applied to this unusual circumstance. Two plan commissioners abstained on the grounds that nothing had been signed with the community. The vote carried anyway.

Speed for the deal. Paperwork for the neighbors. That is which direction the machine is oiled.

The agreement nobody signed

There is still no community benefits agreement. Not before the zoning. Not before the groundbreaking. Not now.

More than forty organizations are asking for one. Block clubs, churches, small businesses, the Alliance of the Southeast, ETHOS, Friends of the Parks. What they want in writing is not exotic. A quarter of the full-time hires in the first three years drawn from local zip codes. Real cleanup with ongoing monitoring. Limits on noise, dust and light. Protection for the parks and the lakefront. Something against displacement. A community credit union.

The developer's answer is that it held more than fifty public meetings attended by more than fifteen thousand residents.

Fifty meetings is not a contract. A contract is one page you can take to a judge. Everybody in that room knows the difference, which is why one side keeps asking for the page and the other side keeps counting the meetings. When the party holding the lease will still be collecting rent past the year 2124, one page matters more than fifty meetings.

The meter

ComEd's estimate is that the quantum park alone could eventually pull around 350 megawatts.

Then there is the other building. A Related Digital data center planned elsewhere on the same site could draw as much as one gigawatt. That is roughly what 800,000 homes use.

A University of Chicago physicist put the effect on household bills at about $158 a year, and called that the low end. ComEd says it works to keep large customers' costs off residential bills. Meanwhile the average residential bill went from about $107 a month to at least $120 this June, a jump of at least 12 percent, driven by demand from exactly this kind of construction.

The governor signed data center tax incentives into law back in 2019. He paused those incentives this summer, as the mood turned. He is on the ballot in November.

Last month the mayor signed an executive order tightening data center rules and called for a temporary moratorium on new ones. He did not commit to stopping this project. He went to a town hall on the Southeast Side and got jeered on his way out the door.

Where's mine

The seal still says Urbs in Horto. City in a Garden.

Mike Royko already answered it, in Boss, in 1971. Ubi est mea. Where's mine.

Sixty years on, it is still the only question that gets you to the bottom of a Chicago deal. Who got theirs. Who got the bill. Write South Works down by name while you can still see it, because the brochure is already printed and the brochure will always be newer.

See also: A quantum campus on the South Side will be taxed at the same rate as a bungalow for thirty years

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