Sundown Suburbs Make Integrated Neighborhoods Hard to Achieve
In most northern metropolitan areas, the key race relations issue, generating the most anguish and the most headlines, has long been the black ghetto and its expanding edge. Conflict at this “frontier” provoked the great Chicago race riot back in 1919 and hundreds of clashes since, in Chicago and elsewhere. This boundary is still where white resistance is most apparent, where blockbusting and white flight take place, where whites sometimes riot. News stories from the inner city are also usually full of conflict: gang or school violence, disputes between black residents and Asian or Jewish store owners, or charges of police brutality. Our media naturally go where the action is. Like journalists, most social scientists have directed their attention to the inner city, trying to figure out what to do about its indisputable social pathologies, and to the line of demarcation between the ghetto and the adjacent frontline suburb, refining such concepts as “tipping point theory” to predict when whites will flee and blockbusting will succeed.
All this seems reasonable enough, on the surface. Many—not all—inner-city neighborhoods do manifest social problems, and white flight from working-class sundown suburbs closer to the expanding black ghetto does confirm white racism. But there is more to it. The engine that drives “frontline” suburbs to go overwhelmingly black lies neither in those suburbs nor in the expanding black ghetto, but across town—in the elite sundown suburb. Concentrating on where the problems appear can cause journalists and social scientists alike to overlook the seat of the problem. It is hard for interracial suburbs to retain whites when overwhelmingly white suburbs offer more prestige. Indeed, residents of elite sundown suburbs often put down interracial suburbs precisely because they are interracial. Like residents of independent sundown towns, sundown suburbanites also exaggerate how black an interracial suburb is. Carole Goodwin found that as soon as a few blacks moved into Oak Park, an interracial frontline suburb just west of Chicago, people in more distant sundown suburbs perceived it to be half-black. They further “knew” it would go all-black.
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Believing this prediction legitimized their own decision to locate in sundown suburbs nowhere near a black or interracial neighborhood.
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The resistance to integration in these placid all-white elite suburbs, often miles away from the frontline suburb, drives the entire blockbusting process. Interviewed by a Detroit newspaper in 1955, a working-class homeowner in an interracial suburb understood this all too well: “It gets so tiresome being asked all the time to sell your house. I bet they don’t call out in Grosse Pointe or Bloomfield Hills or Palmer Park all the time asking those people if they want to sell.” She was complaining about real estate agents who solicited whites to sell and then steered black would-be buyers into these “changing neighborhoods,” rather than to all-white suburbs.
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Even without steering, African Americans know they may not be welcome and will not feel welcome in places such as Grosse Pointe. Understandably, they therefore prefer interracial suburbs to all-white ones, so they move to recently desegregated towns. Meanwhile, European Americans know they will be welcome and feel welcome in sundown suburbs; indeed, some choose them precisely because they are so white. Others move there to get real amenities—fine schools, nice parks, good city services, safety, and aesthetic values—but the biggest single draw of sundown suburbs is status. Housing segregated along race and class lines still signifies social power and success. As families prosper, they both display and purchase their status by moving to a more prestigious and exclusive neighborhood, and the whiter the suburb, the higher its status. In that sense,
most
families move to elite sundown suburbs because they are so white. We have seen that upper-class suburbs such as Darien, Connecticut; Tuxedo Park, New York; Kenilworth, Illinois; Edina, Minnesota; and Beverly Hills, California, were founded as white (and usually WASP) enclaves. Each is the richest and most prestigious suburb of its metropolitan area, or close to it. Kenilworth, for example, was Chicago’s wealthiest suburb in 1990 and the sixth richest town in the United States, according to historian Michael Ebner. Other towns ultimately compare themselves to these elite white suburbs. The value of living in all-white suburbs thus filters down from the upper class to all other (white) classes.
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In the quote at the head of this chapter, Thorstein Veblen famously explained how the upper class typically influences all Americans’ values. Tuxedo Park offers literal confirmation of Veblen’s analysis, for it was the epitome of taste, as defined by resident Emily Post and yes, the source of the dinner jacket that bears its name. Post was the daughter of architect Bruce Price, who designed the town. From 1920 to at least 1975, she set the standard of good behavior for the entire United States, with her book
Etiquette,
daily newspaper column on good taste, and weekly radio show.
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So long as towns such as Tuxedo Park bestow the highest status and are so very WASP, neighborhoods that are less WASP and less affluent cannot afford to welcome African Americans—or sometimes even Jews or Hispanics—without further reducing their own social status. Thus the existence and prestige of these places in turn makes it harder for interracial suburbs to stay interracial. Even many families who don’t want to avoid African Americans do want to move to “better” suburbs, which means whiter suburbs.
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Sundown Suburbs Cause White Flight
Why would white home buyers flee an interracial area, especially one where African Americans made up only 1% of the population? Careful research by Ingrid Gould Ellen shows how sundown suburbs cause white flight elsewhere in the metropolitan area. She points out that it isn’t merely racism that fuels this flight, but also three predictions by white suburbanites. First, whites “know” that when African Americans move in, property values go down. And in fact, they have a point: the same home in an elite sundown suburb is usually worth more than in the inner city. But there is more to it. Excluding African Americans from sundown suburbs creates pent-up housing demand in black neighborhoods, so blacks will likely outbid whites when one former sundown suburb opens up. Back in 1917 in
Buchanan v. Warley,
the Supreme Court saw that white property owners would be damaged if they could not sell to all, rather than only to whites. This is another reason—on the demand side, having nothing to do with white flight—why a former sundown suburb may quickly go majority-black.
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Ellen invites us to answer this question: when African Americans move into a formerly sundown suburb, who is more likely to move first—renters or owners? The obvious answer would be renters; it is much easier for renters to move, being more transient and usually less wedded to their communities. If avoidance of African Americans were the primary motivation for white flight, renters would leave first. In fact, owners usually move first. Ellen suggests that renters, having no investment at stake, feel less need to leave.
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So it isn’t just living near African Americans that bothers many white suburbanites; it is also concern for property values.
In the past, a fleeing family, “knowing” that property values are going down because blacks are moving in, often sold to a real estate speculator for less than market value, the agent having said, “It’s all you can hope for now.” Speculators had two advantages over regular buyers: they often offered cash, and they were white. Cash was important, because the selling family needed it for the down payment on their new house in the sundown suburb to which they were moving. Also, until recently many lending institutions would not grant mortgages to black families in still-white areas, so the middleman’s role was essential. Second, the sellers saved face with their former neighbors by selling to a white. In one study in Chicago, 24 of 29 parcels that were sold between 1953 and 1961 were sold through speculators and purchased by black families on installment contracts.
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Property values did not go down, especially not at first. On the contrary, usually the speculator
raised
the price substantially and then sold the home to a black family willing to pay more for a residence in one of the few “white” neighborhoods where blacks could buy. The average markup among the 24 Chicago parcels was 73%! Luigi Laurenti compared twenty interracial neighborhoods and nineteen all-white neighborhoods in seven cities from 1943 to 1955. He concluded, “The entry of nonwhites was much more often associated with price improvement or stability than with price weakening.” Thus even though the first of Ellen’s three predictions—that when African Americans move in, property values go down—isn’t accurate, the fleeing white family never learned that part of the story. Instead, it “knew” that black newcomers lower property values and carried that prediction to its new community.
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Ellen’s second prediction is that whites “know” that communities go all-black once a few African Americans enter. So they flee. It is the prophecy, not the actual racial composition of a town or neighborhood in the present—nor simple avoidance of African Americans—that prompts the exodus. Of course, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy because whites who believe it leave. Sundown suburbs are particularly likely to go overwhelmingly black once they crack and admit their first African American family. In the Cleveland metropolitan area in the 1980s, for instance, George Galster found that among census tracts starting with the same black percentage back in 1970, those predicted to have stronger “segregationist sentiments” lost much more of their white populations. Their own ideology supplies the reason. To those European American residents of sundown suburbs who believe it is correct to live in all-white towns, when even a handful of African American families move in, their town no longer seems defensible.
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Bellwood, Illinois, illustrates the process. Until 1968, Bellwood had been a sundown suburb west of Chicago. Then its first African American family moved in. By 1970, 1.1% of Bellwood’s total population of 22,096 was black. At this point, the dam burst: by 1980 Bellwood was more than one-third black. Bellwood tried to stop the flood, restricting realtor solicitation and banning “For Sale” signs. Bellwood tried to end realtor steering by sending black and white would-be home buyers to see if African Americans got shown homes in “changing neighborhoods” while European Americans got shown homes in securely white suburbs. The suburb tried to market its homes to white home buyers and counsel blacks about available homes in nearby all-white suburbs. Bellwood even took its case before the United States Supreme Court and won the ability to sue realtors who steer, but it did no good—in fact, the case only further publicized to African Americans throughout the Chicago metropolitan area that Bellwood was now open to them. By 2000, Bellwood was 82% African American.
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Sometimes whites start to flee a town or neighborhood before the percentage of African Americans reaches even 1%. “Lily White Lynwood,” for instance, as it was called, a sundown suburb of Los Angeles, had just 9 African Americans in 1960, and 89 “others,” among 31,614 residents. All 9 were female; surely all were maids in white households. By 1970, 160 African Americans lived in Lynwood among 42,387 whites and 806 others, less than 0.4%, a tiny crack in the dike, but enough: ten years later, almost 15,000 blacks lived in Lynwood.
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Now Mexicans and Mexican Americans also flooded in, and by 2000, fewer than 1,500 non-Hispanic whites still lived in Lynwood.
Sundown Suburbs Put Their Problems Elsewhere
We have seen that sundown suburbs behave as defended neighborhoods. Once they get into the NIMBY mind-set, they try to keep out
any
problem or “problem group,” pawning off their own social problems on central cities and multiracial, multiclass inner suburbs. Consider those members of society who are dramatically downwardly mobile—some alcoholics and drug addicts; some Down syndrome children; most criminals; people unhinged and impoverished by divorce; many schizophrenics; elderly people whose illness and incapacity have exhausted their resources and their relatives; employees fired when an industry downsizes and no one wants their skills. Every social class—even the most affluent—generates some of these people. Elite sundown suburbs offer no facilities to house, treat, or comfort such people—no halfway houses for the mentally ill or ex-criminals, no residential drug treatment facilities, no public housing, often not even assisted-living complexes for the elderly or persons with disabilities. This is no accident. Elite white suburbanites don’t want such facilities in their neighborhoods and have the prestige, money, and knowledge to make their objections count. “Without such homes, people with mental illnesses often wind up homeless, especially in wealthy areas,” according to an AP article telling how an elite white neighborhood in Greenwich, Connecticut, blocked a halfway house for years.
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When sundown suburbanites do become homeless, they simply have to leave. Most sundown suburbs do not allow homeless people to spend the night on their streets, and of course they provide no shelters for them. “In suburban jurisdictions,” said Nan Roman, of the National Alliance to End Homelessness, in 2000, “there is no sense that these are our people.” Community leaders worry that if their suburb provides services, that will only bring more homeless people to their town because no other suburb does. The result, nationally, is that cities provide 49% of all homeless assistance programs, suburbs 19%, and rural areas 32%. Yet suburbs have more people than cities and rural areas combined. Less affluent inner suburbs and central cities must cope with the downwardly mobile people that more affluent sundown suburbs produce, as well as with their own. These social problems burden cities twice. First, cities provide some of the halfway houses, shelters, and other social services. Second, cities can tax neither their own agencies nor the nonprofit institutions that provide those services, even though they use police, fire protection, streets, and other city services.
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