Can integration work? Shaker Heights works awfully hard to make sure it does.
the Inquirer Sunday Magazine, May 26, 1991
By ANDREW CASSEL, Inquirer Staff Writer
SHAKER HEIGHTS, Ohio – Brian Cromwell loved the house. A 1930s brick colonial with two fireplaces, leaded-glass windows and a former servant’s suite on the third floor, it was ideal for his young family. Four-year-old Geoffrey would have a yard, neighbor kids to play with and a first-class school within a few blocks when he started kindergarten.
The Shaker Heights neighborhood appeared to have a lot going for it, too – curving, wooded streets, lined with modest-size Tudors, Colonials, Cape Cods, each different from the one next to it, each with a well-maintained front lawn. Around the corner, a handsome playlot featured new swings and slides. Best of all, a five-minute walk would take him to Shaker Square, a 50-year-old shopping center with an upscale atmosphere reminiscent of Harvard Square, where Cromwell had hung out as a graduate student.
Cleveland’s clean, uncrowded rapid-transit line stopped at the square, giving Cromwell an easy 20-minute commute to his job at the Federal Reserve Bank downtown. And there were bookstores, video stores, and some kinds of restaurants you just don’t find everywhere in the Midwest. The area had a certain snob appeal, Cromwell admitted. “It’s where people from New York tend to settle,” he said. “There’s more of an East Coast feeling. . . . If you’re looking for outdoor coffee shops, that’s where you find them.”
But Cromwell had student loans and other costs; although the $73,000 price was phenomenally low compared to the other cities he had lived in, at first the house appeared just beyond his financial reach. What clinched it was the mortgage subsidy, a low-interest, deferred-payment loan Cromwell could use to reduce his monthly payments for up to three years. A subsidy provided by the city and school district of Shaker Heights. A subsidy for which Cromwell and his family qualified because they are white.
RACE SLIDES EASILY INTO CONVERSATIONS IN SHAKER HEIGHTS. Winston Richie, for instance, jokes that he moved into what is now Brian Cromwell’s neighborhood in 1956 “so my kids could find out that there were some dumb white kids in the world.” That took some courage; the area was virtually all white, and one of the first blacks to buy a lot there had had his house bombed. But blacks were already marching for civil rights in the South, and in parts of the North, some white parents were teaching their children that racial integration was the next goal of American society.
Richie is one of three blacks on the 13-member board of the Shaker Heights Fund for the Future, the fund that offered Brian Cromwell a $5,000 incentive to move into what is now a predominantly black neighborhood. In five years, the fund has made more than 100 such loans, nearly all of them to whites, though blacks can qualify if they move into one of Shaker Heights’ whiter – and generally more expensive – neighborhoods.
But Richie, who was Shaker Heights’ first black city councilman and is still among its biggest boosters, sees nothing wrong or unfair about spending public money to attract more white people to his town. “It’s difficult for a white person to say some of these things and not come off sounding like a racist,” he says. But “if blacks flock to Shaker seeking integration, then eventually it won’t be integrated anymore.”
Others refer to it more delicately as “encouraging diversity.” With Americans as touchy about race as at any time since the 1960s, the idea can be so politically charged that what you call it telegraphs your position pro or con. Perhaps the most neutral description is this: In Shaker Heights, it is official government policy to notice where blacks and whites live, in order to encourage more of them to live together.
Integration is a municipal service here, right along with tree-trimming and fire protection. To provide it, the town of 32,000 budgets more than $600,000 annually, as much as it spends on parks or snow removal. Most of the money goes into what are called “affirmative marketing” programs, designed to counsel and coax home-seekers – particularly whites with school-age children – to do what in most of America does not come naturally.
“It’s based on the notion that we have to take race into account to get beyond racism, and we have to put our money where our mouth is,” says Don DeMarco, Shaker Heights’ director of community services and a self-described “unreconstructed integrationist.” His 17-person staff monitors real- estate and apartment listings, lobbies corporations, consults with brokers and shows property to prospective buyers and renters. Between 1,400 and 1,600 people come through the office a year.
Those willing to move into neighborhoods where their race is officially deemed underrepresented get help; others are politely turned away. Or, as DeMarco prefers to put it: “Our programs don’t help people to explore their segregative housing options.” That doesn’t mean whites and blacks who want to live surrounded by people who look like themselves may not; just that they must do it without the official help of the city.
Shaker Heights is not the only town in America to try this, but it is part of a very small club – communities that have made integration not just a civic goal, but a matter of political and legal policy. Most of them are near-in suburbs of some of America’s most racially polarized cities, such as Cleveland, Detroit and Chicago. But where most local governments tend to try to ignore racial change, believing their policies must be colorblind and/or hoping the issue will quietly disappear, officials in towns such as Shaker Heights, Southfield, Mich., and Oak Park and Park Forest, Ill., have embraced an apparent contradiction: that to build a community in which race doesn’t much matter requires years – decades – of paying race the most careful attention.
The pre-Christmas party crowd is quite segregated as it surrounds Thomas Moore’s dining room table: Sports fans stay over by the Swedish meatballs; parents trading teenager horror stories predominate by the punchbowl.
Racially, however, it’s as thorough a mixture as you could find. This is the Ludlow Community Association’s annual Holiday Open House, an affair that, like much else in Shaker Heights, is carefully planned to mingle residents of different races.
The association, one of six tightly organized neighborhood groups in the city, picks three “volunteer” hosts each year, at least one black and one white. Residents of the Ludlow area – Brian Cromwell’s neighborhood – are invited to a floating party, moving house to house on a Saturday night. Even the hors d’oeuvres are balanced; the committee takes pot-luck contributions in advance and distributes them evenly among the three houses along with the association’s six communal punchbowls.
The atmosphere is warm, if a bit stiff; most of the guests are middle-aged couples who greet each other in the manner of folks who meet once or twice a year at most. Turnout, in this neighborhood of over 500 families, is hardly overwhelming; perhaps 75 people on this cold December night drift from Moore’s elegant Tudor-style apartment to Leona Noss’ and Charles Williams’ homes several blocks away.
It used to be somewhat more intense; in the late ’50s and early ’60s, living here was an almost revolutionary statement. “It was kind of a crusade,” according to Lou Salvator, who moved here in the mid-’60s over the objections of his Italian relatives. At a time when governors were blocking schoolhouse doors in the South, and mayors were fighting open-housing laws in the North, the little Ludlow area attracted national notice as an island of racial harmony, a pioneering community where integration was almost a religion.
Those were years when Cleveland’s black population was moving up and out, following the trolleys and bus lines out of the central core. Whites in the city’s old Jewish, Hungarian and Italian neighborhoods stayed one jump ahead of them, fleeing for the suburbs like their counterparts in Philadelphia, Chicago, New York and elsewhere. Integration came to be understood as something that existed from the day the first black moved in to the day the last white moved out.
Shaker Heights was determined to be different. Developed in the 1910s and ’20s by two ambitious brothers named Van Sweringen, it was a model planned suburb, designed to attract Cleveland’s professional class with elegant homes, gracious streets and first-class amenities. Elementary schools were distributed so that every child could walk home for lunch, and two trolley lines were routed from downtown Cleveland so that nearly every breadwinner could commute to work.
It wasn’t just for the ultra-rich, although the absence of industry meant taxes were high. Along with enormous mansions on five-acre lots, the Vans, as they are still remembered, built scaled-down versions for the middle-class, some designed cleverly to conceal the fact that they were divided into two- and three-family units.
But Shaker Heights wasn’t meant to be for everyone, either. In its early days, Protestant churches received free land in hopes of attracting their congregants, and new homeowners were urged to adopt deed restrictions that explicitly barred “undesirables,” including Jews, Catholics and blacks.
The barriers to Jews and Catholics were largely down by the 1950s, however, and Shaker Heights had become known as much for its liberal tone as for its affluence. The lawyers, teachers and others who lived here preached tolerance, voted Democratic and did not panic when their children marched in civil rights and anti-war demonstrations. And when integration began to hit home, they were determined not to flee.
Ludlow, the first Shaker Heights neighborhood to see a large influx of blacks, became the laboratory. An aggressive community association organized block groups, lobbied banks, real-estate brokers and city government on a range of issues from redlining to building codes. At the same time, the group organized its own neighborhood marketing efforts, keeping lists of homes for sale and recruiting white prospects. The motive was not to discourage blacks from moving in, but to convince whites that integration could be a stable, permanent condition.
“It was never integrated, but it was always integrating,” asserts Alice Murray Rose, who was one of Ludlow’s black pioneers. A stately woman now in her 70s, she is wistful about those years, when the community struggled against the institutional prejudice of banks and real-estate brokers. “We had something special here,” Rose says. “The people who came in since the ’60s don’t seem to go out of their way as much to be community-minded.”
Nonetheless, the Ludlow group has over the years succeeded in convincing a core group of blacks and whites that it is possible to share a neighborhood – to worry over the same crabgrass and traffic, to watch each others’ kids grow up, to do all the modest, unexceptional things neighbors do – without driving one race or the other out of town.
Renee Rivers remembers her reaction when, just after moving here from an all-black section of Cleveland, she was asked to host a community barbecue by her white neighbors. They said it was because she had the biggest back yard on the block. She was skeptical. “At first I felt maybe that I was on display. . . .I had always worked in integrated environments, but we never socialized with whites other than as required by my job.
“As I became more familiar, though, I learned that attitudes hadn’t changed since I moved in, that everybody was treated like that. . . . Eventually, you forget about what race they are. You just identify them with their names and their personalities. You don’t look at people from a racial point of view.”
DON DEMARCO CALLS it a “third America” – a community of blacks and whites who eventually find they have more in common with each other than with others of either race. “People get invested in what they live,” he says. “Most Americans, white and black, live segregation. We’re probably as far toward integration as you get.”
How far is that? An estimated 30 percent of the town’s 32,000 inhabitants are black, about the same percentage as throughout the greater Cleveland area and double the level of 20 years ago. During that same period, some neighboring towns in Cleveland’s eastern suburbs have remained all white, while others have “flipped” to become nearly 100 percent black. Clearly, Shaker Heights’ policies have contributed to a slower, more balanced process of racial change.
By other, more subjective measures, moreover, the city appears remarkably well mixed. Though there are predominantly white and black neighborhoods, a visitor to Shaker Heights can’t easily tell where they start. On a given night at the Thornton Park ice rink, little black and white girls take figure- skating lessons; black and white boys mix it up on the hockey teams.
Elections don’t swing on racial bloc votes. In last year’s primary race for state Senate, black City Councilman Peter Lawson Jones picked up the endorsements of the “white” media but was beaten by a white who had the backing of Cleveland’s black mayor.
“You do observe black families and white families being quite comfortable together,” says Brian Cromwell, who has lived here almost three years. “I’m sort of a minority on my street – perhaps 80 percent of my neighbors are black – and you are confronted with certain cultural differences, in the sense that my musical tastes are perhaps different than my black neighbors’. But I’ve come to realize that the families there basically hold the same sort of values toward education that I hold. I feel welcome in my neighborhood, and my son, Geoffrey, feels welcome.”
There are more tangible signs. A recent study of housing prices in the area found that homes in Shaker Heights gained more value during the last decade than those in less integrated communities of either color. According to DeMarco, that comes from simple arithmetic and provides a rationale for integration programs even more powerful than social justice: The bigger the potential market, the greater the demand for homes.
“Try looking at housing integration in terms of supply and demand, rather than in legal or moral terms,” he says. “If you’re a community interested in keeping your housing values up, you want everybody competing for what you have that can afford it.” If one group drops out of the market, that is, if demand drops, then values drop and tax revenues and services follow. “That hurts blacks and whites alike.”
Not that this is a racial utopia. Almost all whites fled from Moreland, an older, historically working-class area abutting the Cleveland-Shaker line, years ago, and even DeMarco has given up trying to reintegrate there. Some blacks in town see the integration-maintenance program as a scheme by whites to maintain political control of the city. “It’s only because the City of Shaker Heights was uncomfortable with the number of blacks (moving in) that they funded this effort,” said Sheila Kelly, a Shaker Heights resident and past president of a predominantly black real-estate brokers’ organization. Supporters of the program say such criticism is at best misinformed, and at worst disingenuous. Some of the biggest winners from white flight, Richie notes, have been black real-estate brokers. “When communities turn from all white to all black, they make a lot of money.”
The city’s tight concern for zoning, building codes and traffic patterns also sometimes spark racially tinged complaints. In September, some blacks revived a 12-year-old dispute over traffic barricades at the town line, which they said were installed to keep black Clevelanders from driving through Shaker Heights neighborhoods. A huge banner went up across a main commercial street where it crossed the line welcoming motorists to “Apartheid Shaker.”
Shaker Heights officials shrugged it off, pointing out that the neighborhood it was being charged with keeping blacks out of was itself predominantly black.
Nonetheless, city leaders have been dogged for years by the obvious problem that their home-marketing programs and mortgage subsidies appeared designed to cater to whites – and in effect to white prejudice – while ignoring, or even penalizing, blacks.
Until the early ’80s the Shaker program was vulnerable to such charges, in part because of an economic fact of life: The areas of town where blacks tended to buy were those with the lowest-priced houses. Neighborhoods like Malverne and North Park, where many of the homes look like the backdrops for luxury-car advertisements, remained close to lily-white. No matter how sincerely Shaker Heights committed itself to helping integrate all parts of town, the reality was that fewer blacks could afford to buy into the wealthier areas, and those who could generally needed no help from the city.
The solution, which DeMarco and Richie devised in 1985, was missionary work. Together with Cleveland Heights and University Heights, two neighboring towns that had copied the Shaker model, they started a new organization that counsels and makes loans to blacks seeking homes in six mostly white suburbs to the northeast. Though these towns, known collectively as the Hillcrest communities, are near major highways and have lots of moderately priced houses, blacks viewed them as hostile territory, particularly after a black couple’s home was firebombed in 1983.
Officials in the Hillcrest towns were invited to help fund the new East Suburban Council on Open Communities (ESCOC), but when none did, ESCOC set up shop anyway. There were charges of liberal carpetbagging, and some threats of violence, but in five years the agency says it has helped about 300 black families find housing.
Richie, ESCOC’s full-time director, takes an approach that is non- threatening but persistent, pointing out to local officials and real-estate brokers the advantage of having blacks locate all over town rather than cluster together in a new ghetto. “Even well-meaning, well-intentioned people have trouble getting in front of this stuff,” he says. “Changing this system is much harder than getting somebody on a bus.”
The ESCOC program gives Shaker Heights’ housing office a place to refer blacks who come looking for housing help, and supports the argument that Shaker is interested in more than just limiting its own black population. “We are stronger as a community if there are many other places invested in the same kinds of values that we are,” says DeMarco.
But the arrangement doesn’t satisfy the harshest critics of integration maintenance, some of whom contend that all such programs are based on implicitly racist assumptions. Nor does it put to rest a long-running argument over government’s proper role in promoting racial balance – an argument that only grows sharper as Americans wrestle over affirmative action in hiring, education and elsewhere.
“This whole notion of managed integration stigmatizes African Americans because it assumes that only African Americans can ruin a community,” according to Peter Flemister, president of an NAACP branch in suburban south Chicago. “Why don’t they worry that there are too many Jews, or Italians, or Dutch people?”
Flemister lives in Park Forest, a post-World War II suburb 30 miles south of Chicago that has attempted to balance its own black and white population with some of the same devices used in Shaker Heights. But in 1983 Park Forest’s program was challenged by the area’s local Board of Realtors, who said it violated federal fair-housing laws and discriminated against blacks.
The resulting lawsuit, now awaiting a decision by a federal appeals court in Chicago, has become the vehicle by which opponents of integration-maintenance programs hope to eliminate them.
Such opposition comes from an unusual alliance, including some black civil- rights groups and predominantly black real-estate organizations and the historically white-dominated National Board of Realtors. William North, executive director of the board, vehemently opposes integration-maintenance programs, saying they give community groups the right to do what his members cannot. “You have a double standard,” he said in his Chicago office recently. “Community organizations can engage in steering, but a real-estate broker goes to jail if he does.”
North makes two arguments. After being accused for years of blocking minorities from white suburbs, he says, the only proper attitude for a broker today is strict compliance with the equal-opportunity laws. “Let’s assume we were wrong, that prior to 1968 we were blind,” North said. “Then we got religion. We opened the doors to the communities. Why are you telling us to shut ’em?”
But North also attacks the premise that fostering integration is the business of government at any level. “We are committed to freedom of choice, to residential choice,” he says. “The only way you can guarantee integration is to restrict choice. People who talk about (having both) integration and freedom of choice are playing a semantic, hypocritical game.”
Flemister’s local NAACP branch, which is supporting the Realtors’ suit, agrees. “The fair-housing law doesn’t state a preference for an ideal number of blacks and whites,” he says. “The goal is to prohibit discrimination and to provide a freedom for all people to live wherever they choose.”
In fact, the federal government’s position is still unclear. It was the Department of Housing and Urban Development itself that coined the term affirmative marketing in the ’60s when it ordered builders of federally subsidized housing to try to integrate their developments.
But in the 1980s, the U.S. Justice Department sued apartment managers in New York and Chicago who set aside specific apartments for people of different races. The New York case, involving the Starrett City Apartments led to a Supreme Court decision banning such quotas.
There are no quotas in Shaker Heights, insist city officials, who argue that their programs expand rather than limit people’s housing choices. “You don’t have much in the way of meaningful free choice unless you have among your choices a community that is integrated and is projected to remain so,” DeMarco says.
The issue has sharply divided both real-estate brokers and fair-housing advocates. While the National Association of Realtors pushes to abolish integration-maintenance plans, some of the organization’s largest members defend them. “I can see what’s happening in my own community better than Bill North can,” said Len Okuly, manaer of the Smythe-Cramer Co. real-estate office in Shaker Heights, whose brokers work closely with the city to market houses there.
And despite frequent prodding from Flemister and others, the national NAACP has consistently avoided taking a position on integration-maintenance programs. Their reticence may be strategic; the same arguments against integration-maintenance plans can also be brought to bear against affirmative- action in hiring, education and other areas. “How do you support freedom of choice in the housing market and not undermine your argument in the job market?” North says.
But that doesn’t dissuade opponents such as Flemister, who brings to his argument a visceral rejection of government policies that offer incentives to white people. “We African Americans have suffered discrimination for far too long; we certainly aren’t going to accept the slightest impediment on our freedom to live wherever we choose,” he said. He does, however, have a suggestion for local officials, like those in Shaker Heights: “If they are so concerned about the racial makeup of the community, they can try to restrict the freedom of whites to leave.”
Shaker Heights supporters call that point of view both shortsighted and self-defeating. Stressing white guilt or black victimization is a certain way to keep integration from occurring in the future, they say. And according to Alexander Polikoff, a Chicago public-interest lawyer who is representing the Park Forest program, white flight from “changing” neighborhoods is no more proof of racism than is black reluctance to move into all-white areas; both are based on some mix of rational and irrational concerns. “When a black declines to move into an all-white neighborhood, we don’t accuse him of prejudice; we say he’s acting sensibly,” Polikoff says. “Why is that less true of a white who decides not to stay in an area that is changing, when the negative consequences of resegregation are so evident around the country?”
Nonetheless, feelings like Flemister’s are widespread enough to make this a touchy issue, even in neighborhoods like Brian Cromwell’s. “I don’t tell my neighbors that I’ve received these subsidies,” he said. “Some accept them as a way to maintain the diverse community, but others view it as implicitly insulting that you have to pay people to put up with living in a minority neighborhood. . . . I’m sensitive to that and I just don’t bring it up.”
In fact, Cromwell says some aspects of the Shaker housing loan give him pause as well. “It requires a degree of local monitoring by local government that at some point makes me uncomfortable,” he said. “At some point, they want to get a look at you; you have to come into the housing office to sign the documents, and you have to bring your wife.
“Now, my wife is Hispanic. She was born in Lima, Peru, although she grew up in Ithaca, N.Y. But for this purpose she’s considered white. But what if her grandmother had been black? What if her great-grandmother had been black? Do you want your local government inquiring into your racial ancestry?
“It goes with the ballgame, but it’s something I haven’t totally resolved in my own mind.”
Copyright Philadelphia Newspapers Inc. 1991
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