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.” We didn’t used to see that many blacks. It’s like we went to sleep in the winter, and it changed. Just that quick.

In a short period of time, white panic took over, and a large number of homes in Parkmont became available. This period of white flight coincided with the pent-up demand for housing in safe, reputable urban neighborhoods among the city’s upwardly mobile working-class black families from nearby communities. Because this period of time overlapped with a national trend in the rise of specialized mortgages and government programs to support first-time homeowners, even black buyers with only one income could make the leap to Parkmont. Subprime loans enabled potential homeowners to put down very little money (as little as 2% of the value of a home) as a down payment. Many new residents also qualified for down-payment assistance programs through banks, jobs, the city, and other types of financing that became widely available to lower income groups and first-time homeowners. Thus, the 1990s and early 2000s represented a brief period of integration for Parkmont.

In this modern era of white flight, hostility toward Parkmont’s blacks was not as overt as it had been in the 1970s when blacks first entered the community to attend school at Lombard. Charlene Lawson, a black police officer who was assigned to be a “community relations liaison” in Parkmont, asserted that the more overt racial tension occurred in the nearby Italian communities situated between Parkmont and the black neighborhood of Westside: “When I came out in ’94, ’95, ’96, there was one street that was still the borderline. You couldn’t really cross over there unless you lived there. We actually had to have a detail there because of the racial tension from the change.”

Instead of the open resentment found in the nearby Italian communities, Parkmont’s mostly Jewish residents talked quietly about “the change.” They would discuss racial turnover only when it felt safe to do so, and even then, it was often in the context of other “nonracial” concerns such as schools, crime, and taxes. It would be dishonest to characterize Parkmont’s remaining whites as enthusiastic about integration or eagerly anticipating the chance to interact with blacks in order to advance the cause of racial harmony. That said, many of the whites who chose to remain in Parkmont were the most tolerant of blacks and integration. These stayers were also active members of Parkmont’s civic association and made concerted efforts to reach out to new black residents and help socialize them into community norms.

Like the whites leavers who moved away, the stayers were aware of the possibility that crime and disorder might accompany racial integration. After all, whites in the United States have long associated blacks with crime because of negative past experiences, gossip, local news stories, as well as the more general media representations and stereotyping that pervade U.S. culture and that are especially exaggerated in cities with large black populations.11 Additionally, Parkmont’s remaining whites had to endure the warnings of family members, friends, neighbors, and realtors who spoke of the inevitable “ghettoization” of Parkmont and the associated risks to stayers’ property investments and personal safety. Thus, crime and disorder soon became the focus of civic association meetings convened at the local synagogue. Keeping longtime residents in the community, preventing and controlling crime, and avoiding social and environmental degradation were the key goals of Parkmont’s “block watch” groups and block captains. It was no coincidence that civic association leaders and members timed the prioritization of these goals to overlap with the onset of black in-migration. White stayers, many of whom were elderly, knew they needed the energy, skills, and interest of younger people to meet their goals, so they eagerly urged new black residents to get involved. Stayers correctly assumed that these young black newcomers with families would be interested in maintaining a stable, orderly community with property values that would continue to appreciate over time. So, for a brief time, Parkmont’s whites and blacks actively worked together toward common goals.

However, when white residents, some of whom were civic association members, continued to sell their homes, and new whites failed to relocate to Parkmont, membership in the civic association dwindled. Many of the remaining members became disillusioned as complete racial change started to seem inevitable, and residents feared that economic and social decline might soon follow. Morale and organizational effectiveness slowly deteriorated as older white stayers and young black newcomers felt betrayed by their community leaders and neighbors. With resegregation well under way and seemingly unstoppable and the knowledge that Parkmont was not a violent community needing immediate intervention, it was easy for elderly white residents facing health deterioration and busy, hardworking pioneer families to cut back on their civic association involvement and refocus their attention on their personal lives.

As blacks continued to stream into Parkmont, pioneers remained aware and concerned about the racial factors contributing to white out-migration. When buying homes from whites, it was commonplace for black buyers to engage in awkward conversations with white movers. They would ask why the white sellers were moving, often with skepticism, and would hear a range of excuses. Since whites did not want to insult current black residents or scare off potential buyers, they mostly explained that Parkmont’s housing was no longer meeting their changing lifestyle needs. Sam Wilson, one of the first pioneers to move to Parkmont, explained that even though whites were congenial when he first arrived, he still felt suspicious of the racial intolerance of white sellers:

You felt welcome, but at the same time, you just assume that people aren’t going to tell you the truth. [Laughs.] They put their “for sale” sign up and say, “Well, my grandkids moved.” Or they’ll tell you, “We really don’t wanna leave, but the bills are so high now.” C’mon. They’re just giving us an excuse. You don’t have to tell me anything. You wanna move. You got to do whatever the hell you wanna do, but when you start giving me an excuse like that? That’s definitely like you’ve got some sort of racial issue behind it.

Between 1990 and 2000, when Parkmont’s white population declined by 59 percentage points, it was the second most active sale tract in the entire city. In contrast, suburban sales activity in the metro area was associated with increases in white population. By the 2000 census, Parkmont was a majority-black neighborhood. Soon, the only whites left were senior citizens and a group of middle-aged whites who lived on the fringes of society, such as those who lived with their older parents into adulthood and then inherited their homes, immigrants, the unemployed, and the physically and mentally disabled. Even with so few whites left, some black residents continued to hold on to the image of Parkmont as relatively integrated, probably because they had become so accustomed to living in neighborhoods with no racial diversity at all. Second-wave resident Ramell Worthy compared Parkmont to his last neighborhood and expressed the sentiment that even a tiny percentage of nonblack residents counts as “integrated” to him: “Ethnically, it’s probably a little more mixed. Definitely. Even if it is just a small percentage of this neighborhood that’s white. My last neighborhood was all African American.”

Today, Parkmont is known as a black neighborhood. Most white senior citizens who remain are in their eighties, with some in their nineties. At the beginning of my fieldwork, many stayers were relatively healthy and mobile; many others were small, bent over, walking with canes, and had limited time left in an independent living environment. Stayers enjoyed talking about Parkmont and the feelings of family and community that they once felt in this close-knit community. They also discussed the shared histories of Parkmont’s original residents. Many expressed gratitude that they were still able to walk to the local synagogue or “shul” (the Yiddish word for synagogue) where they could socialize, worship, and gain support services.

However, over the course of my research, the local temple had closed down and had become a black Christian church with very few Parkmont congregants. As older stayers talked to me, it was easy to imagine them as parents in young families starting out after World War II. Although the younger black families never knew them as fully engaged human beings and important authority figures in the community, many pioneers still made meaningful connections with stayers. Just as these elderly whites learned about and socialized with blacks at the end of their lives, the younger pioneers glimpsed the way that stayers had lived, learned of Parkmont’s institutional history, and witnessed the role of the neighborhood in stayers’ lives, successes, and their sense of community attachment, satisfaction, and identity.

Black Flight: Gradual Decline, Not Upheaval

Racial change need not result in continued population churning and decline, but this is frequently what happens to neighborhoods after white flight. Many communities that become integrated start off with a stable economic base of residents, low crime, quality local businesses and institutions, and successful schools. However, these neighborhoods often become segregated and conditions worsen. Some research on integrating neighborhoods shows that residents fear racial change, and if they want to prevent neighborhood decline, they must work aggressively and in an organized fashion to maintain racial integration, prevent the public perception that the neighborhood is unstable and that properties are losing value, and stave off rapid decline in the forms of crime, disorder, and poor educational opportunities.12 Some strategies for reaching these goals could include maintaining or improving housing quality, revitalizing shopping districts, building effective community organizations that focus on quality of life issues, and “managing” integration through intervening in the real estate market to promote fair housing practices and prevent panic peddling.13 Unfortunately, these interventions are not likely to occur in many of the urban communities that are most vulnerable to white flight. When racial change is rapid, the original population is elderly, and the organizational structure of a neighborhood has been significantly weakened, white-flight communities like Parkmont are in a poor position to mobilize.

Although some of Parkmont’s decline is physical in nature and some is social, residents have an overall sense that conditions are getting worse, and many pioneers have an impending sense of doom about the future of the community. Both white and black residents must learn to live with the changes, but this does not mean that they do not care. They stay for several reasons. Since many black residents have jobs that keep them in the city and many cannot afford to move to a better urban neighborhood, they do not believe they have the option to relocate to an improved situation anytime soon. Furthermore, black residents are quite familiar with the truly dangerous parts of the city; they frequently remind themselves of the relative safety of Parkmont, taking solace in the popular urban refrain that “crime is everywhere” in some form. Like the black residents, white stayers also compare Parkmont to worse neighborhoods. As eighty-two-year-old Aaron Schneider said when I asked about the noise levels on his block, “I’ll tell you what you don’t hear. You don’t hear anything really bad here—at least not as much as you do in other places that have killings and shootings every night.”

In addition to taking pride in its relative safety, Parkmont residents are comforted by and seek to maintain their reputation as a community of homeowners. In fact, Parkmont’s 2000 homeownership rate was well above the city’s average and remained unchanged during the massive white flight that occurred between 1990 and 2000. Although most whites have since left and the overall mobility rate of residents is now higher, almost three quarters of Parkmont’s residents owned their homes in 2000. The average household, though working-class in terms of family members’ occupations, brings in a lower middle-class income. The rapid and massive depopulation of whites allowed thousands of upwardly mobile blacks from poorer, less stable, and more dangerous neighborhoods to own a home in a community with the characteristics that most whites take for granted.

Yet at the same time, larger housing patterns have fueled a subtle decline in Parkmont. Research shows that the years between 1993 and 2004 marked a period of rapid homeownership for African Americans, with blacks experiencing a 7.7 percent increase in homeownership.14 Specifically, the rapid shift in the profile of Parkmont’s black residents is at least partly attributable to the fact that they took part in this national trend of increased minority homeownership. As is true of many neighborhoods with large minority populations, Parkmont subsequently experienced a wave of foreclosures, ranking high in the city’s share of subprime loans. The mortgage strain was too much for many of Parkmont’s black families and has taken a toll on the appearance of the area. In addition to financial struggles with mortgages, many second wave residents have struggled to keep Parkmont’s older homes maintained and in good repair. The large inventory of homes and the availability of low-income housing programs have also led to an increased visibility of residents who earn lower incomes. Lower income residents have always had some presence in Parkmont, but they mostly lived in a few apartment buildings concentrated on a couple of blocks; now they are far more conspicuous and spread out. Thus, Parkmont’s neighborhood disinvestment is much more evenly represented spatially, coming in the form of second wave residents who fall into one of several categories: those who live in rental housing; those who acquired homes with subprime mortgages; those who participate in low-income homeownership programs; and those who reside in homes that only became available after property tax defaults and foreclosures.

Even with all of these changes, Parkmont does not fit the tragic image of a white-flight neighborhood violently spiraling out of control. According to the typical tale of white flight, the older white stayers should have been trying to escape a black neighborhood in decline with falling property values. On the other hand, black residents were supposed to be content because they finally had access to the safety, good schools, orderly environment, and decent neighbors that they have always wanted. To my surprise, this was not the case. Many pioneers have fled, following in the earlier footsteps of white residents. Those pioneers who remain also want to flee, but not all will be able to realize their desires. Many purchased their homes as municipal employees, and while the city has rescinded some of its residency requirements, blacks are often tied to their homes by jobs, family obligations, and finances. To these public service and safety workers (e.g., teachers, police officers, EMTs, utility company workers, social workers, nurses, prison guards, sanitation workers, and firemen), white flight and the presence of the second wave of black residents have brought forth an obvious decline. The pioneers want to preserve the well-being of their children, their property investment, and their dream for a safe, peaceful, attractive, respectful community.

The Changing Streetscape

Though not plagued by liquor stores and public housing developments, the transformation of Parkmont can be gleaned from its appearance. More changes followed when housing stock started to turn over, and the neighborhood began to lose segments of the population. For instance, as is true in most major cities, stable small businesses lost ground when suburban shopping mushroomed and national chains began to buy out stores. Some store owners followed the white population out of Parkmont. Now the business environment contains many small, struggling stores that are new to the neighborhood. The withdrawal of established businesses has symbolized disinvestment to the many residents who are unhappy with the quality and stability of local stores and restaurants.

Most stayers and many pioneers reported that they can easily observe the changes in the neighborhood as they walk down “the strip.” The strip is a two-way thoroughfare that is several blocks long, facing and intersected by long streets of brick row houses. On any given day, pedestrians walk on the strip to take children to school, pick up take-out food, shop for conveniences, run errands, or wait for the bus. There is a steady flow of traffic on the strip as buses and cars make their way to other parts of the neighborhood, to the suburbs, to the expressway, or toward nearby neighborhoods. Overflowing trash cans near the bus stops line the street, spilling garbage and debris to the ground. The businesses exude a bare appearance with limited signage and décor. They give onlookers the impression that the members of Parkmont’s business community either do not care about the physical appearance of the neighborhood or else they are unable to afford the necessary improvements.

The men, women, and children of Parkmont consume and purchase a variety of items on the strip: Italian ices, front doors that are fortified with security bars, and sandwiches from take-out restaurants. They have access to chain drug stores and fast food restaurants. Residents also have the option of shopping in many of the shabby-looking, immigrant-owned small businesses, such as the large, cluttered Asian-owned dollar store that was formerly a bank. There is also an Asian-owned beauty supply store specializing in black hair care and cosmetics, an Italian tailor’s shop with a sign in the door saying “out of business,” a snack shop owned by an African man, and a tiny Caribbean-owned hair braiding salon. Two businesses are Israeli-owned: an auto repair garage and a shoe repair shop. On the strip, one may also see black children from the United States, Africa, and the Caribbean playing at a fenced-in local daycare center located near a barbershop owned by a second wave family who rents a home nearby.

Absent from the strip are the businesses that mainly used to cater to Parkmont’s white residents. There are no longer hair salons that cater to the needs of older white women, many of whom have thinning hair that they are used to having rolled and set. Optimistically, there are none of the telltale signs of ghettoization—no conspicuous public housing towers, pawnshops, liquor stores, bail bondsmen, check cashing agencies, or alcohol carry-outs. But the emergence of abandoned storefronts and the addition of a new Laundromat are indicators that the social class status of the community is slipping. The dearth of community pride symbols, murals, and institutions that cater to the younger, black family community is glaring and unfortunate.

Aside from the strip and a nearby shopping center, the streets of Parkmont are residential. The homes are set back from the street. Compared to suburban homes, the lawns are miniature, but city dwellers often remark on the “huge front lawns” here. In reality, the houses feature small squares of grass and little patios where residents feel the need to chain down their chairs, tables, and barbeques. Many homes have neatly kept lawns with manicured flower beds and bushes, but others have garbage strewn on the grass in the form of Chinese take-out advertisements, candy wrappers, and discarded cups. It is common to see homes that show signs of age with old, broken, or worn-out doors, peeling paint, bare lawns, cracked cement, and rusted railings along the front stairs. Often found on the doorposts of homes are the dirty, faded outlines of mezuzahs (Jewish ornaments containing scripture), which symbolize that the house was once owned by someone of Jewish heritage. On any given block, a visitor may pass a house that is boarded up or one that is abandoned and surrounded by tall weeds, but these kinds of homes are not yet the norm. Second wave black residents tend to reside in the worst looking homes in the neighborhood. In general, they view the outside appearance of their homes as a low priority and only a slight source of embarrassment.

Pioneers blame the second wave for the decline in Parkmont’s appearance. Even though pioneers know that it is likely that some of the second wave residents simply cannot afford to keep up their homes, they also think that these new residents have different values and choose not to make their homes a priority. Pioneers feel that they have little in common with their newest neighbors and have learned to keep their distance, leaving the neighborhood feeling withdrawn and antisocial at times. Though children can be seen all over Parkmont for most of the day, adult residents are at work or else just keep to themselves. On an average day, the curtains or blinds are drawn for privacy and few adults go outside to socialize or play with children. A thirty-year-old second wave resident named Aliya Sampson acknowledged the lack of close ties between black residents:

Here, everyone kind of just minds their own business. I’m not sure if this is a neighborhood. I don’t think this is a neighborhood where people have been on their streets, living here for as many years as the people were living on the streets that I used to live on. Literally, there were generations of people—people my sister’s age, and my sister is thirty-eight. They’ve been there for that amount of time, so it was the same people, and everybody knows each other. Here, I think it’s people from Westwood that have moved in. Now there’s no real community feel. It’s like people move in quietly. There’s no “Hi. Welcome to the neighborhood. My name is such and such.” They just mind their own business.

Stayers, Pioneers, and the Second Wave

In order to understand the development of this distinctive neighborhood and the relationships and conflicts found here, Parkmont must be considered in relation to the three groups who have made it their home.

The Elderly White Stayers

The first group to settle in Parkmont, the white stayers, is disproportionately composed of Jewish senior citizens, most of whom were the original owners of their homes. The stayers once lived in Parkmont in large numbers, and most of those who remain have been in the neighborhood for close to fifty years. Stayers’ spouses are either living with them but in poor health or have died. Many stayers have adult children who live in other cities or states or else live in the suburbs, but others are childless and only have contact with nieces and nephews. The stayers have lost many of their closest friends; their longtime confidants and neighbors either fled from Parkmont when it “changed,” or became so ill that they were forced to move into retirement homes, or, increasingly, they have died. Stayers’ long lengths of residence in Parkmont and their status as “originals” have led them to decide to “age in place” for as long as possible and to resist the temptations and pressures to move. During my research, I met stayers who maintained their lifestyle for years, but many others became ill, died, or had to move into retirement communities that could better meet their needs.

In terms of social class, most stayers are from working-class backgrounds and have only high school degrees, but some had been teachers or once worked in retail. Most live on fixed incomes and are extremely careful with their finances. Even so, stayers tend to be economically stable and live modest lives in Parkmont. They have made peace with the racial change in the community and are relatively comfortable with having black neighbors. Although some stayers report that economic limitations have played a central role in their decision to stay in Parkmont, most say they had no desire to move and that they could have afforded to move earlier if they had really wanted to do so. Stayers recognize signs of decline in the neighborhood, but like many black residents they are quick to emphasize that “crime exists everywhere.”

The category of “stayer” describes residents like Gerri Holtzman, an eighty-one-year-old Jewish widow. She and her husband purchased their home in 1951 after hearing about Parkmont from family and friends. They liked that it was Jewish, affordable, young, conveniently located, near her family, and close-knit. Gerri recalled that Parkmont neighbors were extremely close and lived in a “bubble” of safety and familiarity: “We used to walk up to the strip and park the baby carriages outside of Sal’s Diner and go eat lunch. Sal would stand at the register, and he would say, ‘The baby in the green carriage is crying.’ He would tell us which baby was crying.” Gerri’s emotional investment in Parkmont stems from the community providing a good environment for her children, as well as from her continued involvement in the local synagogue. She has an active social life, visiting the local Jewish Community Center (JCC) several times a week to take aerobics classes and to walk on the track. She also enjoys the local library, which has a large collection of Jewish and Yiddish titles. For now, residents like Gerri can be found scattered on every block of Parkmont.

However, many other stayers are in far worse health and are fairly isolated. Edda DeLuca, an Italian immigrant who speaks broken English, reported that after arriving at Ellis Island, the only thing she wanted in a neighborhood was to be close to public transportation and live near a church that conducts the Catholic Mass in Italian. She stressed how important it was for her priest to understand her in confession and give her counsel in her own language. With no children and most of her original neighbors gone, Edda became very close with the first black neighbors who moved in, but these valued pioneers have since moved away.

Like longtime residents in most places, the stayers share a common history, but Parkmont’s stayers are also joined by the shared experience of being the group of whites who lived through Parkmont’s full arc of white flight. This means that many know about the history of businesses changing over, the metamorphosis of Parkmont’s appearance, the decline of the local school, and most have heard neighbors’ stories about episodes of local crime. As they have aged, they have become less “in the know” than they once were, and some of their interpretations of neighborhood changes seem to be based on outdated ideas. For example, stayers often notice that many of their new black neighbors have “improved” their homes by installing embellished screen doors. However, they fail to realize that many black residents have purchased these doors for security reasons. Coming from lower income and higher crime areas, pioneers have replaced Parkmont’s older, flimsy screen doors with the kind of steel storm doors that are more commonly found in the higher crime parts of the city.

The Pioneers

The pioneers are the first black residents who moved to Parkmont in the 1990s. They are trying to get ahead in life. Mostly single women and families, they are not trendy, unattached urbanites looking for fun. They are focused on working at their jobs to earn enough money to pay bills, have some nice possessions, and provide their children with quality residential and school environments. Most pioneers work for the city in some capacity, although many admit that they have career ambitions to own a business. Up until the mortgages crisis, many wanted to get involved in the real estate industry by becoming realtors or by generating additional income through “flipping houses,” or renting out properties nearby.

Pioneers have many positive things to say about Parkmont, and they emphasize that the neighborhood is far better than most in the city. They consistently compare Parkmont to worse areas where they or their loved ones have lived in the past. All pioneers filter their evaluations of Parkmont through this kind of comparison. They are relieved that visible drug houses, violent gangs, widespread vandalism, abandoned buildings, and “cheap stores” are not a major presence in their new community, and they are proud that “houses are selling in the low $100,000s.” Janice, a thirty-seven-year-old nurse and mother of two teens, is typical of the striving pioneers. She purchased her home with her husband in 1998, but they split up, and he moved out. She sends her daughter to a charter school, and after a bad experience at Lombard, she now homeschools her younger son. She described the relative safety of Parkmont compared to the neighborhood where she was raised, explaining the violence that drove her away from there to Parkmont:

Oh, it’s horrible there. Horrible. Because of the drug trafficking. I’ve seen people using the stop signs for target practice. Young black men are dying, including my nephew. He got killed. They’re just dying at a ridiculous rate. It’s not a joke. I always say, “Who’s gonna marry my daughter?” because there’s just so many black guys dying. You can go as young as fifteen to twenty years old, and within that little age range, there were so many getting killed.

Despite pioneers’ relative satisfaction with Parkmont, they also perceive significant decline in the community. When white flight was taking hold, they were troubled to watch Parkmont resegregate, and they continue to be saddened when older stayers pass away or grow ill. Pioneers have witnessed some Parkmont homes turn into low-income housing available for purchase, and believe that an increasing number of homes are also rented privately and through government programs. Many pioneers are extremely disturbed by the threat to their investment caused by homes on their block that are in disrepair or vacant. They complain about the daily incivilities and signs of crime, such as poorly controlled children, trash on the streets, abandoned cars, loud music, and even the occasional sounds of gunshots. Pioneers feel outrage and despair when they hear stories about disorder, drugs, and violence at Lombard school. They are sobered by any focus on Parkmont in newspaper and television stories about muggings, shootings, bank robberies, school attacks, and violent drug-related crimes. Pioneers are especially agitated when they see that in many news features about crime in Parkmont, the residents are not only the victims but also the perpetrators, as in recent cases of fraud scandals involving bad checks, gun-related aggravated assaults, kidnapping related to drug dealing, strong-arm robberies, gun sales, drug dealing, murders of innocent pizza deliverymen, and even the beating of Lombard’s principal by a neighborhood parent.

Several pioneers told me that they feel as if they were victims of fraud, duped by a real estate “bait and switch.” They moved to Parkmont as an integrated neighborhood, selecting it based on its reputation as a safe, quiet place with responsible homeowners and an outstanding school. Now, not only has the community resegregated but, more importantly, pioneers have noticed meaningful decline. As a reaction, many have begun to compartmentalize their social worlds and insulate their families. Most pioneers have fled violent neighborhoods, and with so much population churning in Parkmont, they feel distrustful of the newest people around them. They often try to minimize their contacts with newer neighbors, opting instead for neighbor relations with the white elderly residents they have come to know and trust. Parents are reluctant to send their children to Lombard, but in order to send them elsewhere they must spend hundreds of dollars a month on tuition or else figure out a way to get their children admitted and transported to magnet or charter schools. Pioneers see great room for improvement in Parkmont in terms of schools, recreation centers for children, and police presence, and feel pessimistic about the future of the neighborhood. Most would leave Parkmont if only their jobs, finances, and the nearby housing market would allow it.

The Struggling SecondWave

The recent wave of new black migrants to Parkmont represents a second phase of neighborhood transition and has contributed to black flight among pioneers. Like the pioneers, second wave blacks have come from higher crime and lower income neighborhoods. One second wave resident contrasted Parkmont’s social class milieu to that of his last neighborhood: “This is a working-class neighborhood, but in my old neighborhood, there was a lot of illegal activity, a lot of drug dealing. Up here, it’s like more our socioeconomic region, more advantaged than the other neighborhood.” Unlike the striving pioneers, the second wave arrived in a community that was predominantly black with a very limited white presence. They know about the recent racial and social changes in Parkmont in more of a vicarious way, but have had very little contact with white neighbors and do not mix much with the pioneers, either.

Second wave residents seem to struggle far more than the pioneers in terms of economics and family instability. Some are single caregivers of older parents, some come from families shattered by drugs, divorce, or prison, some are immigrants from the Caribbean or Africa, and some are grandmothers raising their grandchildren for a variety of reasons, from drugs to parents’ being soldiers in the war in Iraq. In contrast to the pioneers, the second wavers tend to send their children to Lombard for school. The second wavers find Parkmont to be relatively quiet and attractive, but with little to offer young people in terms of productive activities or recreation. With family members at work all day, second wave children have a great deal of unsupervised time in Parkmont after school. Many children tell of problems at Lombard, frustrations with learning, difficulties coping with family conflicts, the temptations to deal drugs, boredom in Parkmont because of a lack of free amenities for children, and the interpersonal conflicts and violence that they have seen or participated in as new residents. Even when they are not explicitly talking about it, one can observe the relative disadvantage of the second wave children compared to those of the pioneers.

I witnessed the difference between the two groups on one afternoon, when two second wave children, Imani and Jabril, approached me as I waited outside for their neighbor. They asked me to help them with their math homework, which I quickly learned was far too advanced for them. As they sat outside feeling helpless about the standardized test preparation workbooks that they had no idea how to complete, their grandfather’s girlfriend appeared at the door in a nightgown and asked if they were bothering me. She informed me that their mother comes home from work after they are already asleep, and their older brothers usually fill in the answers for them in their notebooks when they get back from playing basketball.

At the local daycare center, Katie Kress, the white director, and Rhonda Hamilton, an African American school nurse and neighborhood resident, explained the social class and cultural changes that have occurred in Parkmont in recent years and the shift in the socioeconomic distribution of the youngest children in the community. According to Rhonda, “We get a lot of kids from the neighborhood. We had, when I began, a lot of ‘private pay.’ Now, we get a lot of subsidy because the area’s changed.” Katie thinks of the neighborhood as lower income based on her contacts with the children and their parents, many of whom are young single mothers and most of whom live in Parkmont or nearby. She says that the neighborhood feels safe, in general, but she admitted that she now keeps the school door locked all day. She shared the following bit of gossip to emphasize the fact that two conflicting groups call Parkmont their home: “It just so happened that there was a drug bust across the street, and we had parents who are police officers who showed up in their uniforms.”

It is clear that Parkmont has experienced a great deal of change since its origins. U.S. Census Bureau data reveal the fact of racial change and the pace of it, but not the character or sentiments of the people who remain. The statistics demonstrate the reality of white flight, but conceal this second stage of black flight. The following chapters illuminate the worlds of the residents who lived though both white flight and black flight, exploring a neighborhood that is not the “urban ghetto” so often associated with white flight, but an interesting and changing black community with its own complicated social character, cultural strengths, and emerging troubles.