This is the 10th installment in a continuing series on the history of Oak Park housing as it relates to diversity and equity.
In the late 1970s Oak Park received an All American City Award and was touted in the national media as a model for successful racial integration. Still, in the early ’80s village leaders saw a need to review integration programs and recommend changes. An accelerated Black migration into Oak Park, deepening conflicts around school integration and intractable housing challenges could not be ignored.
So in 1984, 27 villagers, 20 white and 7 Black residents, including people from business, finance, real estate, apartment owners and civic leaders, though not one renter, researched and developed the Task Force on Racial Diversity Report to assess the progress of managed integration. While praising village efforts from 1964 thru 1984, the report called for major reforms in our schools, in the real estate industry and in building code enforcement (1).
The 1980s baseline
The Task Force provided fundamental data on housing and racial inclusion. Oak Park’s Black population had grown rapidly and median home values increased more than regional averages, doubling in the 1970s from approximately $26,000 to $52,000 in 1980. Blacks were .2% of village residents in 1970, 10.8% in 1980 and by 1984 18%, demonstrating an openness to Black renters and homeowners.
Nonetheless, other facts questioned the success of the central goal of the 1973 Diversity Statement and the 1973 and 1979 Comprehensive Plans, which stressed racial dispersal — that success in integration required interracial housing throughout the village. Instead, census tracts showed extreme differences in racial patterns — varying from 1.6 % Black residents in some tracts to 25% in others.
Black home ownership by tract varied from 1.3% to 9.7%. Rental data by tracts showed a low of 2.2% Black renters to 46%. The report noted that 36% of rental buildings remained all white and that western sections of the village had few Black residents (2). In recent years, housing experts assign much of this variability to the single-family zoning ordinance, which barred multifamily units from more socio-economically exclusive sections of the village (3).
Without casting blame, the Task Force recommended increasing testing by the Housing Center to ensure realtors were not directing whites to predominantly white neighborhoods and Blacks to neighborhoods with a greater percentage of Black residents. The report also recommended amping up training and racial integration counseling for realtors and multi-unit building owners and managers and creating and funding an East Village Association to revitalize East Oak Park to attract more whites.
However, when village officials encouraged realtors to share data on clients and where realtors showed property, realtors refused to cooperate (4). Ongoing complaints eight years later about more discriminatory racial steering led the Community Relations Commission to call for even more testing of realtor practices.
Building code enforcement
In the first years of racial integration the village prioritized property maintenance. The Task Force took up this issue, citing an aggravating factor around code enforcement. Inspections were not frequent enough, response from code violators was often slow, and the system for collection of fines was inefficient. The report made several recommendations, including more inspectors, improved training, a shortened inspection cycle and stiffer penalties for repeated violations.
The most promising reform in housing was the development in 1985 of the village’s Diversity Assurance Program, still operating, which provided loans, grants and other assistance for rehabbing multi-unit buildings if owners listed openings with the Housing Center and accepted counseling and training around management practices and racial integration (5).
Education
The Task Force’s most startling findings and recommendations came from the education subcommittee, headed by Luther Benton. The entire Task Force Report from the start declared District 97 elementary schools as the most important player in achieving racial diversity then and in the coming years. The subcommittee, in sync with community concerns about how racially integrated schools were not working for many Black families, set forth a list of recommendations that have continued to this day. The agenda zeroed in on racial equity within schools as being equal to, if not more important, than inter-school integration.
The Task Force recommended each district address intra-school segregation (tracking and fixed ability grouping) in the curriculum, continue to aggressively sponsor multicultural training and instruction, expand the hiring and retention of more Black teachers, and implement fair disciplinary practices. In the key area of expanding learning opportunity, D97 chose to a provide high-status curriculum for all students in its 1990 Strategic Plan — a reform OPRF High School District 200 would not adopt until 2022.
At the conclusion of the 1992 review of progress on Task Force recommendations, the director of the Community Relations Department, Sherlynn Reid, provided villagers a serious caution, likely shaped by her reflection on tumultuous racial developments in the ’80s and early ’90s in schools, and in the discriminatory denial of the sale of a village church to a Black congregation in 1988. Reid bemoaned the lack of awareness by most residents of the scope and efforts of the village racial integration work and warned “that a general lack of commitment in the achievement of racial integration goals requires a concentrated and aggressive effort if the gains of the last 20 years are to be sustained” (6).
In that work two deep challenges persisted. The first was how to maintain housing affordability for all income and racial groups, as median home prices soared from $132,000 in 1980 to $219,000 in 2000 (7). Affordability was a foundational goal of the village comprehensive plans of 1973, 1979 and 1990. It was indispensable for ensuring racial and class diversity in the village.
The second hurdle was ensuring racial integration throughout the village. This meant the continued dispersal of Blacks across Oak Park and not reaching the dreaded “tipping point” that could create white discomfort, fear and retreat. It remained a strategy rife with moral dilemma and ever-increasing doubt.
Sources for this installment can be found online at oakpark.com
Citations
1. The Task Force on Racial Diversity Report, 1984. Oak Park Public Library special collection on housing history.
2. Ibid.
3. History of Exclusion in America’s Housing Policies, Housing Affordability Institute.
4. Ibid., Task Force on Racial Diversity Report.
5. Oak Park Regional Housing Center: Our History, William Peterman.
6. Review of the 1984 Task Force on Racial Diversity 1992, Oak Park Community Relations Commission.