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Black Housing, White Finance: African American Housing And Home Ownership In Evanston, Illinois, Before 1940 - Statistical Data Included
Journal of Social History, Winter, 1999 by Andrew Wiese
Taken as a whole, the African American housing market in west Evanston reflected a wide range of housing market practices at work in American cities and suburbs in the 1910s and l920s. These included features associated with central city black neighborhoods, such as swift racial transition and home purchase, through contract deeds, as well as practices typical of unplanned blue-collar subdivisions such as owner-building, extended construction, and amatuer financing. Finally, home building in Culver's addition reflected patterns of speculative construction and finance common to middle class white suburbs of the time. Like the localized ethnic markets Zunz described in Detroit, the housing market in Evanston catered to the range of African American home seekers. African Americans, for their part, employed a range of strategies to become home owners. At one extreme, families exchanged sweat equity and inconvenience for home ownership by building homes of their own. At the other, buyers combined savings and a ho me mortgage to pay for professionally built homes. Finally, at every level African Americans in Evanston routinely used housing to their economic advantage through domestic production, sharing costs with extended family, and the renting rooms and or apartments for extra income.
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Lenders and Borrowers
One final question remains: Why, in the context of the Great Migration, did white Evanstonians participate so actively in the black housing market in their community?
The first answer is the reason why people engage in businesses of any kind: to make money. This is the answer that best suited Frank Foster, whose father, Clyde D. Foster, was an active mortgage lender in black Evanston between the wars. "My father was a philanthropic guy," Foster said, "but he was also a hard headed business man." If his father lent money, Foster opined, his motives were strictly business. [63] If so, Foster was in good company. Prior to the Depression, small mortgage lending was a common enterprise for real estate brokers and other small business people, and this was certainly true of Evanston, where mortgage records reveal lending by numerous local real estate agents. [64] In Foster's case, he told his son that he realized early in his career that "'I wasn't going to make the money I wanted just selling houses.'" So, "he got involved in other enterprises," including property management, partnership in a small bank (established inauspiciously in 1929) and local mortgage lending. With relat ively high interest over a short term, small individual mortgage loans were a sound and generally conservative investment before the 1930s, especially when the collateral was a house just across town and the borrower was a neighbor.
Even so, business alone doesn't fully explain the pattern of white involvement in Evanston's black housing market. Race was a critical variable in housing markets nationwide before 1940. Moreover, real estate brokers and mainstream lending institutions were among the chief arbiters of racism in housing markets, playing key roles in the development and maintenance of racial segregation in housing. Real estate brokers' associations were responsible for the spread of racial covenants in property deeds, and they were instrumental in propagating the idea that African Americans (indeed social diversity of almost any kind) were a threat to white property values. For example, the Chicago Real Estate Board, to which several Evanston brokers belonged, supported even the use of force to preserve racial segregation in Chicago in the late l9l0s, and it spearheaded numerous efforts to restrict black neighborhood expansion in the city. [65] In most suburbs, including Evanston's neighbors on the North Shore, white realtors worked not just to segregate but to exclude African Americans altogether. [66] By contrast, members of Evanston's real estate establishment played a key role in the growth of Evanston's African American community. [67] They lent money to black home buyers, which gave them a financial stake in the future of black neighborhoods in Evanston and expressed their faith that black borrowers were a sound financial risk. If Evanston brokers lent money to African Americans for the sake of business, it clearly wasn't business as usual.
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