In 2016, WBEZ’s Curious City project ran a segment about Oak Park’s ban on real estate for sale signs. We ran the piece in its entirety to explain to newcomers why the real estate agents do not use for sale signs in the village.
The ban began in the late 1960’s in response to a real estate practice called blockbusting, in which real estate agents convinced white residents that black families were moving in, lowering property values. The agents then bought the properties of white families at low prices, sold them to black families at a profit, and rapidly changed the racial makeup of neighborhoods in the process.
When this occurred in Chicago’s Austin neighborhood, Oak Parkers like Roberta Raymond banded together and formed the Oak Park Regional Housing Center and created a fair housing strategy that would educate Realtors and allow for better integration of the majority white suburb. In 1972, the village adopted a local ordinance banning for sale signs as part of these efforts.
The thinking at the time was that a proliferation of signs on lawns would act as a scare tactic and convince neighbors that they needed to move out before their property values plummeted and the racial makeup of their neighborhood changed.
A Supreme Court case in 1977 made the ban on for sale signs illegal, but Oak Park continued to retain the ban as part of its municipal code. The village did not enforce the ban, knowing it could not withstand a legal challenge, but local Realtors kept up the practice.
The ban is still the practice among real estate professionals in the village today.
This fall, a non-local real estate agent placed a for sale sign in front of an Oak Park home, and social media groups lit up with comments both supporting the ban and stating that the ban had no place in a world in which discrimination in housing is so clearly outlawed.
We spoke to three local real estate professionals about their thoughts on the ban and whether or not it is still relevant today. Each emphasized that their views were their personal opinions.
Molly Surowitz, vice president and broker of the local Baird and Warner office, recalls the sign kerfuffle from this fall. She received a text from a Realtor in her office with a photo of a Baird and Warner for sale sign in front of a two-flat for sale in Oak Park. Surowitz noted that the sign was not from an Oak Park agent. She reached out to the agent to explain the Oak Park rules.
“This agent was from Arlington Heights and had just ordered signs, and the sign company didn’t know about the Oak Park ordinance,” said Surowitz.
When Surowitz explained Oak Park’s sign ban to the agent, the agent removed the sign.
Acknowledging that emotions can run high on this issue, Surowitz says that’s due to the history behind the ban. “We take it seriously because we’re told about its importance in the history of fair housing.”
Some of the social media comments about the sign ban posited that local agents enjoy the sign ban because it lets them control the market, but Surowitz says that couldn’t be further from the truth.
“Signs help Realtors get leads. We’re not doing it to withhold information. We’re doing it out of respect.”
Realtor Pat McGowan of Baird and Warner has been practicing real estate locally and has seen an evolution in the housing market. She says that even with the sign ban, the early days of her career were quite different.
“In the 1980s and early 1990s there were what we called ‘counseling blocks.’ Real estate brokers were required to have buyers counseled if they were purchasing on a block that was 50% or more minority. We were given maps. It was almost like redlining,” she says, noting that the process was like a reverse of blockbusting.
Calling counseling blocks more of a practice than an actual ordinance like the sign ban, McGowan says the industry was hyper-local at that time.
“There were really only three to five big [real estate] offices in Oak Park. Once you got the majority on board, everyone just went along. There was no MLS, no for sale signs, and no computers. All we relied on was the Wednesday Journal and the Oak Leaves. We picked our office based on the exposure they had in the paper.”
McGowan says that local brokers have long known they don’t need for sale signs to sell houses, stating “It never impeded us from doing business. We’ve weathered some really bad storms with no signs: interest rates at 15-16%; the market crash, Covid.”
Today, things have changed. McGowan says, “An effective marketing strategy is always going to come from the internet.”
Cynthia Howe Gajewski, a Realtor at Beyond Properties, recalls driving around Oak Park in the 1990s looking for a house to buy and thinking there wasn’t a single home for sale. It wasn’t until she connected with a local Realtor that she learned about the history of the sign ban.
Like McGowan, she says the real estate industry has evolved since then. “We live in a different world now in terms of information. The ban is still a part of Oak Park’s legacy, but I don’t think signs sell houses. Everyone looks online.”
Reflecting on her experience in the 1990s she says, “We didn’t have a cell phone in our pockets. We had to get a paper and call a real estate agent. Now, you just get out your phone and check an app.”
For Gajewski, the positives of the internet can be helpful in the way that the sign ban was years ago: it keeps buyers focused on the characteristics of the house.
“When people are looking at a property online, they focus on the particular house. If Covid taught us anything, it’s that people buy because of the listing photos and the floor plan.”
Gajewski says that signs in front of houses do two things: they tell the neighbors that you’re selling, and they provide advertising for the real estate brokerage.
Does Oak Park still need the ban?
Everyone we interviewed emphasized the significance of the sign ban in Oak Park’s fair housing history. Whether the sign ban, official or not, still matters is a different story.
Surowitz says with the high desirability of housing in Oak Park, it might appear that the sign ban isn’t necessary any longer, but she wonders what might happen if “Oak Park wasn’t the incredible community that it is. Would people want to sell all at the same time? For example, if you saw a condo building with 20 for sale signs, you would wonder what was wrong.”
“The ban has worked, so we keep doing it,” says Surowitz.
McGowan agrees. “We do things that way because of the results: it works.”
She notes that in 38 years, she’s never missed not having a sign but says that a sign ban might not have the same ramifications it did when the ordinance was enacted.
She says, “Oak Park isn’t always perfect, but I still feel like the value of the home doesn’t rely on who owns the home. We’re very, very lucky in Oak Park.”
For Gajewski, the importance of signs is waning, even in neighboring suburbs like River Forest where they are not banned.
She says that more and more clients want some form of privacy in the transaction, and that might take the form of not having a sign or listing their house on the private listing network.
At the end of the days she asks, “How often have you knowingly sold a property to someone who saw the sign and closed on the property? My answer to this would be ‘never.’”
