Lacy Sikora’s excellent article last week, “Revisiting Oak Park’s ban on ‘For Sale’ signs” [Homes, Jan. 17] accurately reported on the origins of the village’s ban on these signs, which have been used for blockbusting and panic peddling. It asks the question whether this effectively de facto ban is still needed?
The ban is, indeed, still needed and not just due to the current administration’s evisceration of fair housing law enforcement under today’s GOP’s white supremacist agenda, which makes it even more difficult to maintain integrated communities.
It is needed because the ban, along with the efforts of the Oak Park Regional Housing Center and Oak Park’s prudent practice of “counseling blocks” during the village’s period of housing desegregation, have combined with other essential practices and programs to counteract the continuing dual housing market. The racial enclaves or, in sociological parlance, racial ghettos, that this dual market creates has devastating effects on Black households. It robs them of the wealth that homeownership can generate, leads to an inevitable reduction in government services, and results in racially segregated schools where separate is very much inherently unequal.
Unlike Evanston which remains pretty rigidly segregated, the entry of Black households into Oak Park did not produce racial enclaves. A household’s home is usually its largest investment and generator of wealth. But when Black households are consigned to Black enclaves, their property values are far lower than identical homes in an integrated setting like Oak Park, thus widening the racial gap in household wealth and denying them full participation in the American Dream.
All of this is well documented in the monograph, “Ending American Apartheid: How Cities Achieve and Maintain Racial Diversity,” and in the article, “Oak Park: Integration Takes More than a Racial Quota” which are available free on the “Publications” page at http://www.planningcommunications.com. Also available there is Oak Park’s award-winning Comprehensive Plan 1979, which goes into detail on maintaining a racially-integrated community, including the need for affordable housing.
Sadly, too many Oak Parkers, including some village leaders, are unaware of all the things that Oak Park and its school districts did to prevent Oak Park from becoming as racially segregated as Evanston, the city of Chicago, and the vast majority of suburbs. Our children have no idea what’s been involved. It’s time for OPRF High School to add to its U.S. history curriculum a unit on Oak Park’s efforts to achieve housing integration within the larger context of the dual housing market that forces segregation upon us and still dominates Chicagoland. If our children don’t understand how we got here, then they and their parents won’t understand how to maintain the fragile integration Oak Park currently enjoys.
While nobody pretends that Oak Park or any other Chicago-area town has achieved “perfect” integration, Oak Park remains light years ahead of the rest of the metropolitan area. It cannot take its foot off the proverbial pedal.
Daniel Lauber, AICP, grew up in South Shore during its resegregation and has dedicated his planning and law career to countering the practices that have forced housing segregation upon the nation. As the Oak Park senior planner, he was principal author of its Comprehensive Plan 1979.
