1
THE PARKMONT ENVIRONMENT
White flight remains a relatively common pattern in U.S. cities. In fact, data on neighborhood racial change show that white flight is still far more widespread than white in-migration into mixed areas (see appendix).1 On a very basic level, we know that many urban blacks seek a better place to live and that white and integrated communities tend to have more amenities than segregated, inner-city black communities, where poverty and disadvantage tend to be more concentrated.2 However, we also know that whites often leave integrating neighborhoods. The evidence suggests that there are three major reasons that white residents leave neighborhoods after blacks have entered. First, some whites undoubtedly flee because of white prejudice and discrimination.3 Since World War II, social science researchers and the public have drawn a connection between neighborhood racial change and racial prejudice. Second, many whites are concerned about legitimate “nonracial” problems related to crime, schools, services, and property values that often coincide with racial change.4 In fact, policy and community efforts to maintain or stabilize integrated neighborhoods often respond primarily to this nonracial set of arguments, focusing on improving neighborhood quality, appearance, and services, rather than on encouraging residents to remain in the community, controlling rumors about decline, or promoting integration.5 The fact that white flight often continues in the face of such efforts suggests that they may either come too late or target only part of the problem. Third, a subset of whites moves because their housing needs change at a time that just happens to overlap with a period of neighborhood racial change.6 Whatever its causes, white flight is a persistent obstacle to racial and economic integration.
When white urban residents move away and new white families fail to replace them, neighborhoods undergo racial turnover, often called racial transition, tipping, or succession. However, what happens to these communities after the masses of whites leave? The most common narrative describes a post-white-flight tale of “ghetto” neighborhoods facing violent street crime, where residents live in fear. But is this the inevitable ending? In explaining what happens after white flight, the story of Parkmont provides a new look at the lifetime struggle for city residents to live in neighborhoods that meet their needs to feel safe, comfortable, and successful.
At first, the goal of this book was to further the understanding of white flight by extending the existing research into the new millennium and by providing a portrait of the ways that white neighborhoods change into black neighborhoods. However, it soon became apparent that a second story of equal importance was unfolding: the rapid transformation of white flight into black flight. The stories of blacks and whites who are still living in Parkmont capture the multiple stages of neighborhood transformation that continue after the majority of white residents have departed. Most of what follows in this chapter is a history of Parkmont and a summary of the changes to its overall living environment.
Racial and Ethnic Aspects of Parkmont’s History: 1940s to 1980s
A dense working-class neighborhood, Parkmont was built and settled in the late 1940s on the former site of a farm. It was part of the city’s postwar building boom and larger efforts at residential development for the young families of the World War II generation. Homes were small, but they featured add-ons that were rare in the city at that time: one-car garages, small front lawns, and paved patios. Until recently, Parkmont was home to a large Jewish population. In fact, many white stayers reported that they sometimes referred to the neighborhood as “Little Tel Aviv” (and according to one Catholic resident, as “Kike’s Peak”). According to locals, people viewed Parkmont as a “mini-suburb,” and its school was considered the “gem of the city.” Less than ten miles from the downtown area and close to wealthy suburbs, Parkmont had a very strong reputation as a convenient and self-sufficient community of working-class and lower-middle-class Jews with modest homes, small green yards, and a thriving, diverse retail district.
For its thousands of white ethnic residents, Parkmont seemed like paradise. Yet even though Parkmont was segregated and white, it was immersed in complicated race relations from its beginnings because, unlike other neighborhoods in the city, Parkmont did not have its own neighborhood public school. This was not a problem at first when the original families and their babies began to move in, but by the 1950s Parkmont’s children were old enough to attend elementary school. Residents were forced to send their children to a school located in nearby Wynn Hill. Though it was inconvenient, Parkmont’s Jews were comfortable with sending their children away to attend school in a more established and solidly middle-class Jewish neighborhood, surrounded by many large, stately single-family homes.
However, around the same time that Parkmont’s first cohort of children began attending school in Wynn Hill, the city’s changing population patterns began to alter the racial composition of Wynn Hill’s school. An increase in the urban black population was characteristic of many cities during this period, causing many black neighborhoods and schools to become overcrowded. To many whites, it seemed that blacks were “taking over the city.”7 Soon, black families began to spill over into white neighborhoods and attend the white schools. Parkmont parents learned from their own observations, as well as from family and friends, that Wynn Hill’s school was becoming integrated. In the racially charged atmosphere of the time, Parkmont’s parents believed the school was no longer a desirable environment for their children’s education. In this manner, race became the spark that fueled Parkmont residents’ organized effort to build their own neighborhood school. Parkmont parents successfully lobbied the city to build Lombard, a new school offering classes from kindergarten through sixth grade to neighborhood children, most of whom were Jewish.
With Lombard established, Parkmont remained a solidly Jewish enclave in the 1960s, even though non-Jews (known to Jews as Gentiles) had become a presence. The newcomers comprised mostly first- and second-generation Italian Americans with a smattering of Irish Americans who had migrated to Parkmont from nearby communities and other parts of the city. To these new residents, Parkmont represented a high-status, white urban neighborhood that was in close proximity to jobs, extended family, and ethnic churches, peers, and organizations. In addition, Lombard was a main attraction, as it had quickly gained a reputation for academic excellence and for its successful, well-behaved, achievement-oriented students. The new Gentile residents filled the vacancies that appeared when small numbers of upwardly mobile Jews chose to move from Parkmont’s ethnically integrated and modest row houses to the city’s more spacious and prestigious Jewish first-ring suburbs.
The large segment of working-class Jewish families who remained in Parkmont learned to tolerate, and in some cases, embrace the Italian and Irish “goyim.”8 After all, Jewishness continued to dominate Parkmont’s reputation, power structure, institutions, and cultural life. Parkmont residents were far more threatened by the black population that had crowded into the neighborhoods located just a few miles away. Like most of the city’s whites, Parkmont residents were cognizant of the possibility of black encroachment; everyone knew someone whose neighborhood had “changed over.” However, families in Parkmont took comfort in the fact that their community had remained solidly white. They felt protected in their defended community,9 which was characterized by strong leadership and involved residents; in addition, they knew that the houses in their neighborhood were unaffordable or inaccessible to blacks.10 Like so many white ethnic working-class areas, Parkmont had an unwritten code that prevented blacks from finding any affordable homes that might be for sale: lawn signs were banned. As one elderly stayer said of such signs, “One time somebody put a sign up, and the next night, there was no sign. Somebody took it off.” This informal “no sign” policy helped to stave off racial change for a long time because blacks could not simply drive around and find homes for sale. Additionally, realtors knew that if they showed Parkmont homes to black families, they risked alienating white residents and sabotaging their own earnings and careers. Thus, Parkmont residents felt secure in their certainty that their neighborhood would remain unchanged despite the shifts in surrounding communities. As Susan Waxman, an eighty-year-old Jewish widow, said about her confidence in Parkmont’s future:
I thought I would live here until the day I die. It was so convenient to everything. Through our growing years, the community was one thing that I loved. The kids had a good education at one of the top schools in the city. I think that most of the people who lived here thought that this is where they were gonna stay forever.
Residents’ feelings of security and satisfaction were threatened in the late 1970s when the city implemented a school busing program that would racially integrate Lombard’s student body. The fear of blacks that had once motivated Parkmont’s residents to organize and build a neighborhood school was once again reignited. White families strongly resisted the idea of a black presence in their school. Just as scary to whites was the possibility that black students would soon be spending their after-school time in Parkmont, whether at their library, in their streets, in their businesses, or on their playgrounds.
This time, Parkmont parents’ efforts to avoid black students were unsuccessful, and Lombard did not remain a white school. The city’s implementation of desegregation busing redistributed the student bodies of disproportionately black public schools to the many white schools in white neighborhoods across the city. In a short period of time, Lombard gained a sizable black student body. Many black students confronted hostility from white residents and classmates. For instance, one resident protested the noise made by black students who stayed in the recess yard after school by bending down Lombard’s outdoor basketball hoops so that the black students who lingered after school would have no place to play a pick-up game. Some Parkmont families moved to the mostly white suburbs, but most could not afford to move there or else did not want to because of the convenience of the neighborhood and their emotional and social attachments to the city and community. Instead of moving, many white residents began to divert their children to “whiter” schools located outside of the neighborhood. With the city’s large white ethnic Catholic population, as well as a sizable Jewish population, the region offered several alternatives to Lombard in the form of Catholic schools, highly selective college-preparatory magnet schools, and Jewish day schools. Thus, vacancies began to open up in Lombard, and by the 1980s the school had become majority black, gaining the paradoxical reputation of being a “black school in a white neighborhood” (see appendix for table 1, which shows that Parkmont had no black population in 1970 and was less than 1% black in 1980).
White Flight: The In-migration of Blacks as Residents, 1990s Onward
By the late 1980s, the integration of Lombard placed Parkmont on the radar for many striving black families in nearby segregated communities, leading them to seek residence there. Most of these early arrivals sought to escape the worsening crime and school conditions in a black community called Westside. At first, Parkmont’s black residents were few in number, with fewer than two hundred blacks residing in Parkmont in 1989, making up only 2 percent of the total population. In this very early stage of neighborhood integration, the new black residents coexisted with Parkmont’s white residents, who had by then become accustomed to seeing blacks in the community due to Lombard’s largely black student body.
Interestingly, it was younger white families who seem to have spearheaded Parkmont’s white flight. Unlike older and middle-aged whites, those with school-aged children were forced to confront the decision about whether to send their children to Lombard. The nearby first-ring suburbs, which have long been known for their concentration of old money and their streets lined with large, expensive homes and estates, were beyond the reach of Parkmont families. However, white “leavers” were unwilling to move too far away from Parkmont, as they valued the central location of their longtime neighborhood. Typically, the leavers moved to suburbs that are located less than ten miles away and that met two criteria: availability of affordable homes and largely white populations. Although the Jewish leavers had similar incomes to their Catholic neighbors, they tended to select a different set of affordable suburban neighborhoods, those known for having a significant Jewish presence due to the earlier Jewish exodus from city neighborhoods into the suburbs.
With younger white families on the move, the Parkmont housing market opened up to black home buyers, and soon they could be found on every block. The more tolerant or less prejudiced older white residents stayed put, but many other whites moved to Florida or relocated to condos in the nearby suburbs. As one white resident who left said: “It changed. People moved. Some people seemed like racial issues were always the thing. One person of color would move in, and they were out.” Like weeds, “for sale” signs multiplied on the lawns of row houses. As leavers erected signs, residents could hear conversations among neighbors who frowned as they wistfully reminisced about the old days when Parkmont was solidly white. To them, the very existence of “for sale” signs that were blatantly displayed on lawns announced an irreversible loss of community. With few exceptions, black families were the ones who replaced white movers, as younger white families avoided the integrating neighborhood that contained a largely black school. As the scare spread, the in-migration of new black residents surged from a trickle to a steady stream. One black pioneer who moved in when Parkmont was still mostly white described the speed and cause of the racial change this way:
Let me tell you something black people say to me. They’ll say, “You know, your neighborhood changed.” And I’ll say, “Yeah.” It’s changed as far as being a white neighborhood to being a black neighborhood. It changed. And this is something that I’ve said. It was just like the plague was coming. Like, once the blacks started buying, it’s like the plague. When we came up here, it was nothing to have ten or twelve “for sale” signs for a block. Whites didn’t want to live around us, so they left. They were out of here. It was like, “We got to go. We got to go.” As houses were going for sale all over the place, I told my husband one time, I’m like, “Damn. You know, we went to sleep, and we woke up, and the whole neighborhood is black....