Little did the agent know that the couple did not share his opinions about their new black neighbors, nor did they actually plan to move. As members of the Organization for a Better Austin (OBA), they had been working with community organizer Gale Cincotta to build an interracial neighborhood group to combat agents like him. Their guest had no idea that the kitchen meeting was a sting operation. A hidden tape recorder captured his sales pitch, providing evidence that the man instigated fear about the arrival of black neighbors in Austin. The Chicago activists had a name for agents like him: âpanic peddlers,â real estate speculators who scared whites into selling their homes at undervalued prices, charged black families exorbitant rates for those homes, and reaped enormous profits in the process. The OBA members sent the tape to the Chicago Tribune, and the paper ran three full pages of its transcript.2
The members of OBA reflected a larger trend in the 1960s wherein residents bridged racial and homeowner-renter divisions in an effort to wrest control of their neighborhoodsâ fates from powerful people and institutions who had written them off or, worse, exploited their alleged declines for profit. In âtransitionalâ urban neighborhoods that had begun to integrate, powerful people with money to make shaped the possibilities and limitations for their neighborhoodsâ futures. Real estate agents stoked fear that black residents would bring down property values, turning panic into quick money as they bought low from white sellers and sold high to black buyers. At the same time, residents of Austin and other transitional neighborhoods around the country also felt that their city governments had abandoned them, as many local governments reduced trash pickup or failed to allocate new resources to overcrowded schools. City officials often flagged these same communities for small-scale urban renewal projects, where cleared lots might sit vacant for months or years before new structures went up, leaving eyesores that added to the perception of neighborhood decline. In transitional neighborhoods like Austin, many residents had an overwhelming sense that something was being done to them, without their input, making it hard to envision a future for themselves in the communities they called home. The desire to gain control drove many to action.
As OBAâs activism suggests, transitional urban neighborhoods created conditions ripe for the development of a political worldview that united a neighborhoodâs residents around their shared interest in their neighborhoodâs future. Historians have shown that âtransitionalâ neighborhoods across the country became seedbeds for the politics of racial backlash, as many white homeowners âdefendedâ their neighborhoods from integration, conflating white racial exclusivity with high property values.3 But as OBAâs efforts reveal, the politics of white homeowners were only one option among many available to urbanites as their neighborhoods were in flux. Others embraced a kind of social democratic populism that challenged the logic of free markets in the realm of urban home financing and that aimed to make housing markets more fair than free. These urbanites drew heavily from the playbook of Saul Alinsky, a political theorist whose school of community organizing brought the methods of organized labor out of the workplace and into communities.4 The Alinsky method provided urbanites a framework for analyzing neighborhood problems in terms of power relations, rather than racial difference.
Community Organizing to Manage Integration
Before Austin was a hotbed of real estate protest, it was an all-white community with a mix of homeowners and renters. Chicagoans talked about the neighborhood as one entity, but with two populations divided, north from south, by its major artery, Lake Street. North Austinâs bungalows and small-frame single-family homes gave the area above Lake Street a suburban feel. Its historic Midway Park subneighborhood boasted majestic nineteenth-century homes, as well as several structures designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and his students. It also included a golf course and several manicured parks. Homeowners and renters mixed in South Austin, on the other side of Lake Street, where row houses, brick two- and three-flats, and corner apartment buildings lined the streets. But locals often flattened these north-south distinctions when referring to Austin in general. So did the cityâs demographers, when they counted residents on both sides of Lake Street as part of the Austin âcommunity area.â The neighborhood had a reputation as a âcity within a cityâ and a âposhâ place to live in the early 1960s.5 âIt was a place where you didnât go shopping unless you wore a hat and gloves,â recalled one longtime resident.6
By the mid-1960s, Austin was the last all-white neighborhood on Chicagoâs West Side, but it seemed it wouldnât remain so for much longer.7 âWe knew that transition was going to start coming,â OBA member Mary Volpe recalled. âIn cities like Chicago, you can tell where the transitionâs going to beâ based on the trends visible to local people.8 White Austinites described a sense of creeping racial change with reference to the specific streets that served as the neighborhoodâs racial boundaries. Cicero Avenue seemed impenetrable during the mid-1960s because, as OBA member Ed Bailey put it, locals assumed that the white homeowners west of Cicero would âresistâ new black residents. Bailey, one of the first black homebuyers on his block, recalled the ârumorâ he heard âwhen one or two families moved in across on the west side of Cicero.â The sense in the neighborhood was âWell, the blacks done broke the barrier,â he said, âand that started the whole stampede of whites moving out and blacks moving in.â9
The âtransitionâ of racial change came late to Austin, and the timing mattered because Austinâs residents had already witnessed other Chicago neighborhoods undergo racial change. As historian Amanda Seligman has shown, the West Side had a âblock by blockâ pattern of racial change that began in the southeast corner of the area and moved northwest toward Austin, at Chicagoâs westernmost boundary.10 Black southerners moved in great numbers to northern cities in the wake of World War II. In Chicago, real estate agents âsteeredâ new arrivals only to blocks where other black families already lived, or to the blocks just adjacent. Black residents first moved to the neighborhoods east of Austin: East Garfield Park, then North Lawndale, and finally West Garfield Park, which shared a border with southeast Austin. These neighborhoods never actually integrated, however. Instead, most whites fled, and the demographic shifts were dramatic. North Lawndale, for example, jumped from less than 1 percent black in 1940 to 91 percent black in 1960, and 96 percent in 1970.11 With other West Side neighborhoods showing similar trends, observers noted that the end point of block-by-block racial change was âresegregationââa nearly complete turnover from a white block to a black block. âThe history of racially changing communities,â a local journalist said, âbears out the grim factâ that racial change âbreeds not integration but resegregation.â12
Most white West Siders identified panic peddlers, or âblockbusters,â as the primary agents that ensured that so-called racial transition ended in resegregation. By the time Austin began to integrate, as Seligman has shown, real estate dealers had a well-established process for changing the racial composition of resident blocks in Chicago.13 They combed one small area at a time in search of anxious white homeowners, stoking fears that black residents would soon be moving in. Some whites sold because they refused to live near black neighbors. Others sold because they thought the presence of black residents would make their property values decline. Many whites accepted low offers on their homes based on a perception that the longer they waited to sell, the lower their property values would fall.14 With the titles in hand, panic peddlers sold those homes to black families, whom they could charge more owing to the âdual housing market.â In the block-by-block pattern of racial change, black buyers could only purchase homes in area that had already been âbusted.â This racial steering in the real estate market created a smaller supply of available homes for black people, thus driving housing prices up. As a result, a black family paid the panic peddler much more to purchase a home than the white family who previously owned it had received for the sale. Real estate agents reaped enormous profits in these deals, at times selling a home for more than twice what they paid for it.15
In many ways, Chicagoâs Austin was not a unique neighborhood in the 1960s United States. At the same time Mary Volpe and Ed Bailey discussed Austinâs future as a transitional urban neighborhood, other residents in other cities had similar conversations. In Buckeye-Woodland, a Hungarian neighborhood on Clevelandâs East Side, white residents believed their community would soon âtransitionâ based on their cityâs trends.16 In northeast Baltimore, white neighbors assumed the same. Indeed, in the mid-1960s, nearly every older industrial city in the Frost Belt corridor had at least one white neighborhood, if not several, that locals believed was on the verge of racial change: the northwest Bronx in New York City, a stretch of Michigan Avenue in Detroit, Jamaica Plain in Boston, Bond Hill in Cincinnati, Federal Hill in Providence, a North Side neighborhood in Wilmington, a South Side neighborhood in Minneapolis. The list went on and on. In these places, which occupied both a spatial and an imagined middle ground between the suburbs and the âinner city,â conditions were ripe for the white racial backlash that historians have documented in neighborhoods in Detroit, Boston, and more. But conditions were also ripe for other responsesâfor democratic experiments in integration, for interracial community organizations, for creative solutions to combat real estate abuse. Indeed, white racial backlash to black in-migration was not predetermined. Rather, the way that whites responded to racial change was shaped by the specific people and specific ideas that gained the power to define neighborhood problems in their specific communities. In other words, white responses hinged on the options in front of them. And at a time when the movement for black freedom gained achieved its most visible national victories, some urban whites embraced the vision of black and white Chicagoans living together in neighborhoods like Austin not only as a pragmatic option that allowed whites to stay put, but also as the only moral option in a racist society.17
So when blockbusting panic peddlers appeared in such neighborhoods in the mid-1960s, white residents faced a choice. They could move to another all-white community, which many did. Between 1950 and 1960, over 399,000 whites in Chicago alone fled to nearby suburbs. Alternatively, whites could resist the arrival of black families, which many also did. In nearby West Garfield Park, that choice took the form of a homeownersâ rights organization called the United Property Group that closed ranks against black newcomers in the name of protecting property values. Several went so far as to target black families with violence, âfirebomb[ing] a black familyâs homeâ in one case and hanging an effigy on a black familyâs porch in another. But still another option was stay in their neighborhoods and live among new black neighbors. Whites made their choices by weighing circumstances specific to their householdsâthe cost of buying a new home versus paying down an existing mortgage, ties to the neighborhood church, proximity to friends and familyâbut within the larger context of the dominant assumption among whites that racial integration drove down property values. Many of these choices were discussed in private conversations that have been lost to the historical record. But some whites had these conversations in public. And in some of these older urban neighborhoods, residents left a paper trail that provides a glimpse into one way that âtransitionalâ communities responded to racial change, which would soon reshape national conversations about the relationships among race, risk, and neighborhood in urban real estate markets. They worked across racial lines to form community organizations that fought real estate abuse instead of their new neighbors.18
The Austin priest Monsignor John E. Egan was a driving force behind the formation of OBA. He believed that community organizing could achieve what some sociologists called âmanaged integration.â19 He thought it would give whites an alternative to irrational fear and flight, while giving black people a vehicle for becoming part of the neighborhood and gaining a sense of belonging.20 Egan had first become interested in community organizing when he met renowned community organizer Saul Alinsky in 1954, while attending an organizer training for Chicago priests. âI was attracted to Saul,â Egan said, âbecause he wanted to do for people what I believed God wanted doneât...