Standing brief
The South Works deal
Four hundred and forty acres of Chicago lakefront, who owns the ground under it, and who is paying to make it worth owning.
Chicago · Updated 16 September 2026
What is confirmed
The register
- Blue Owl Capital’s real estate arm paid U.S. Steel about $75 million for the old South Works land in 2025.
- Related Midwest and CRG paid about $58 million. Reporting indicates that figure is the 99-year ground lease itself, not a purchase.
- Related bought a little over $3 million of land directly from U.S. Steel.
- Blue Owl holds the deed. The lease runs to 2124. The terms are not public.
- The state committed $500 million, and had already put $200 million into the Chicago Quantum Exchange before any of this.
- Cook County put in $5 million cash and invented a new property tax class. The city put in $5 million from bond proceeds and passed a rebate.
- Class 8 MICRO cuts the assessment rate on property used for quantum computing from 25 percent to 10 percent, and holds it there for thirty years.
- The city’s own analysis put that benefit at more than $175 million over its life.
- PsiQuantum’s own statement put its combined state, county and city package at more than $500 million over thirty years.
- A referendum drew 330 signatures. The Board of Elections threw it out on 13 January 2026 on form, not on any challenged signature. No signed community benefits agreement exists.
- U.S. Steel ran the yard from 1882 to 1992. A hundred years of mill waste went into the soil. The state EPA approved a new remediation for the full 440 acres at the end of last year.
- In 1911 the Bureau of Corporations put U.S. Steel’s actual plant at around $676 million and the securities stacked on it at around $1.40 billion.
What is still open
Holes, named
- The full terms inside the 99-year ground lease. Not public. Worth pulling from the recorder.
- The price U.S. Steel took for the parcels it sold directly.
- Whether U.S. Steel reserved mineral or subsurface rights in the conveyance. One line in a recorded deed answers it.
- How much of the 440 acres is fill over former lakebed, and what public trust interest survives on made land.
- Whether the parcel carries a legacy Lake Michigan withdrawal allocation from the mill era.
- Who holds the power interconnection for roughly a gigawatt, what it cost, and who carries the ratepayer exposure.
- Whether the Class 8 MICRO rate survives a change of use, and who decides.
- Whether Blue Owl intends to securitize the ground lease. A question, not a finding, until a document says otherwise.
- Whether Blue Owl is financing the vertical construction. Not established in any public reporting.