2

CHOOSING PARKMONT

Whites Staying and Blacks Pioneering

I have a nice home, and I don’t intend to move out.

—Joanne Newcombe, stayer, aged ninety-one

Oh, I was excited. I was ready to go. My whole family lived on my old block—four houses in a row. So, I was ready to get away. I was ready to get off the block.”

—Nina Jones, pioneer, aged thirty

The first phase of racial transition in Parkmont can be accurately characterized as white flight. Although many white residents sought to leave integrating Parkmont as soon as possible, others continued to find the community a desirable place to live. As younger, middle-aged, and even elderly whites moved out, Parkmont’s demographics formed an unusual mix: elderly white stayers and black striving pioneers. This chapter introduces these two groups, explains how they came to share a community, and explores the role of choice and agency. In so doing, it complicates what we think we know about race, as we see two very different groups who have come to identify with each other in many ways. In part, this chapter presents a new look at elderly whites and pioneers in white-flight communities by examining their unique motives, decisions, constraints, and lifestyles. These stories challenge the commonly held assumption that people who stay behind after white flight are involuntary, marooned urbanites.1 The narratives also bring into question any presumptions that black newcomers are indifferent to the loss of the white population, feel comfortable with resegregation, and are socially distant from elderly white stayers.

Eighty-four-year-old widower Joe Cassidy is one of the original Parkmont residents and is representative of many elderly white stayers who feel satisfied with their decision to stay in Parkmont. When I first met Joe for an interview, he sat in a recliner in his Parkmont home, debating whether to microwave a frozen dinner or head to the local Greek diner, the Grapevine. The Grapevine has an inexpensive menu, and Joe has been eating there for decades. He felt tired after a round of golf at the nearby public course. He walks to this course several times a week because, as he said, “I’ve given up my driving pleasures and opportunities.” Joe usually eats dinner at home and reserves the Grapevine for French toast breakfasts. But on this day, he felt like having a large, satisfying meal at the diner where the waitresses know him and where he is so familiar with the food options that he does not even need a menu. He decided to get dressed and go out. As we reached the front patio where he likes to read the paper in good weather, he spontaneously felt the need to defend his decision to live in an integrating neighborhood. He pointed to the cars parked along the street, “My kids want me to move, but look! Not one junky car. I love it here.”

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the U.S. population has been aging just as large cities have been losing sizable portions of their white populations.2 In general, whites are overrepresented in the retirement-age population.3 This is important because elderly whites are less likely to move than younger whites when their communities shift from white to black,4 and neighborhoods with more senior citizens experience larger amounts of racial change.5 The issues of neighborhood racial change and older people “aging in place” reflect a national trend. Not surprisingly, these demographic and social changes have trickled down and produced racial changes in many central city neighborhoods, affecting schools, local institutions, services, voting, and other aspects of community life.6

Why did Parkmont’s elderly whites stay in their community at higher rates than their younger white neighbors? A substantial body of literature suggests that there are three factors about older people in contemporary society that make this situation so common. First, even though serious illness and disabilities become more likely with age, today’s older people are healthier, wealthier, more educated, and live longer than was true in the past.7 Second, along with these improvements, elderly people express a strong preference to “age in place.”8 Consistent with this desire, most seniors live in conventional homes by themselves or with a spouse and in “natural” communities rather than in retirement settings.9 And older people tend to live in homes to which they are quite attached, with almost half living in the same house for twenty-five years or more.10 Third, the old and “oldest old” (i.e., those over eighty-four) are especially likely to live in metropolitan areas.11 Thus, to summarize, it is common for older people to live independently, in metropolitan areas, and in their own homes, where they have lived for a very long time. With aging in place becoming an increasingly common trend,12 it is important that we know more about the lives and views of older people who decide to stay in their homes even when their communities change around them.

The pioneers, like the stayers, have also served as witnesses to Parkmont’s population changes. The pioneers form a distinct group in that these are families who, when they gathered their moderate resources to buy a first home, selected a historically white community. Depending on the definition chosen, the word “pioneer” may simply refer to an early settler, but the word also elicits images of people with more lofty aspirations: trailblazers preparing the way for others to follow into an unknown territory. The latter definition of pioneer aptly describes Parkmont’s earliest black residents, many of whom knew very little about the terrain of the neighborhood before they settled in and found many surprises awaiting them. Pioneers’ accounts provide a unique perspective on the transformations in Parkmont, while also communicating their place in the social and spatial hierarchy of urban blacks.

Parkmont’s black pioneers may also be considered “strivers.” The concept of the striver is well known in black history literature as a label for ambitious, upwardly mobile individuals who “want to get ahead.”13 For instance, in New York’s Harlem neighborhood sits a block called “Strivers’ Row,” where many early black professionals once lived. Many pioneers in Parkmont fit the description of striver. In fact, one pioneer epitomized this identity when she distinguished the families who left their old neighborhoods to come to Parkmont from those who stayed behind: “I think we had what you would call the want to get a better education, like college, and keep children in positive things. Whereas there were certain blacks that they just tried to live. They were just trying to live.”

Some of the most notable studies of black communities have focused on either the middle class or those who are extremely poor. These studies serve as a useful point of contrast to life in Parkmont. Mary Pattillo-McCoy’s (1999) description of a black middle-class community called Groveland provided a memorable portrait of a long-standing black community in which residents functioned both as friends and family.14 In fact, Groveland’s neighbors were so close-knit that they even felt comfortable intervening on a personal level to stop social problems affecting the community, such as disorder, drugs, and violent crime. The relationships among four generations of Groveland’s black residents have been characterized as “networks intertwined”:

At the neighborhood level, neighborly and family connections affect the management of youth behaviors, including crime. Residential stability is important for the creation and maintenance of social networks. Because Groveland is very stable, thick kin, neighborly, and friendship ties are the norm. These networks positively affect both the informal and formal supervision of youth.15

In Groveland, residents were unified, organized, and willing to intervene when problems emerged.

Elijah Anderson’s (1999) ethnographic study of a low-income urban black community also points to a neighborhood that is distinct from Parkmont.16 Although some of Parkmont’s black residents struggle to pay their bills and some have lost their homes to foreclosure, very few are living in poverty. Additionally, pioneers’ beliefs that the second wave blacks are inconsiderate toward neighbors and have a poor sense of community standards does not mean that a sizable share of Parkmont’s residents would be considered “street” in the manner that Anderson describes. In Anderson’s study, the presence of “street families” in the neighborhood is more extreme and omnipresent:

Some people tend toward self-destructive behavior; many street-oriented women are crack-addicted (“on the pipe”), alcoholic, or involved in complicated relationships with men who abuse them…. The seeming intractability of their situation, caused in large part by the lack of well-paying jobs and persistence of racial discrimination, has engendered deep-seated bitterness and anger in many of the most desperate and poorest blacks, especially young people.17

Parkmont’s pioneers are certainly not poor, but neither are they privileged in any absolute terms. This is not to say that the pioneers started out in life with nothing before reaching Parkmont, although some residents could be described in this way. But generally, in terms of socioeconomic status, most pioneers are working-class people who are better off than the average black family residing in the inner city.

To an outsider, it may seem that Parkmont’s striving pioneers have arrived, but they have also been forced into the unfamiliar situation of entering a new community without the comfort of friends, family, and a familiar cultural milieu. Blacks who leave rough neighborhoods to move into white areas in the city may not do so under conditions that highlight the need for strong social ties. In making the move to Parkmont, pioneers made a trade-off because in a modern mass society where social networks seem increasingly unnecessary for a satisfying home life, they believed that the peace, safety, and quality of life would outweigh the absence of long-standing social ties with other families. However, the potential for white flight in Parkmont has left pioneers especially vulnerable to the forces of neighborhood resegregation, decline, and social distrust. In Parkmont, two specific sets of conditions have elevated the need for strong neighbor networks and social structures. First, pioneers must work long and unusual hours to make ends meet and need community members to help supervise children, maintain streets and homes, and organize the community to deal with local problems. Second, pioneers who relocate to white neighborhoods are heavily focused on the community as a financial investment. They have made great economic and social sacrifices to buy homes there and are having an extremely hard time watching the neighborhood slip away. To them, a home in Parkmont represented a chance to live in a mixed community, safe from serious crime, and with neighbors who share their desire for a quiet, well-kept, orderly, considerate environment.

Modern White Flight and Interracial Residential Lives

White flight conjures up images of overt white prejudice and community opposition of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s,18 but it may be less obviously associated with contemporary urban change. This orientation to the past makes sense given that many blacks have suburbanized in recent years, and some urban neighborhoods have experienced increases in white population as whites have moved into central city neighborhoods to gentrify or live in high-rise luxury condos. However, these optimistic and highly publicized patterns are modest compared to the more dominant urban migration pattern of white flight, which remains a common phenomenon in many cities. Between 1990 and 2000, the one hundred largest U.S. cities lost extremely large shares of white population with whites in almost half of these cities losing “majority status.”19

When cities lose white population, neighborhoods also experience racial turnover. One might imagine that white flight begins with the out-migration of the elderly, who are generally seen as having more old-fashioned racial attitudes. Yet the more typical trajectory of change from a white neighborhood to a black one begins with the exodus of middle-aged and younger residents, especially those with school-aged children, followed by an increase in the population of black residents who replace them.20 Then, for a period of time, new black residents coexist with elderly whites. As older whites die or relocate to retirement communities, new white residents fail to replace them and the neighborhood population becomes almost completely black.21 Although accurate, this depiction of white flight provides only a surface description of the very important period of time during which older whites and blacks co-reside.

Aging populations tend to be unevenly distributed across cities, forming enclaves.22 A relatively small group of sociologists and gerontologists has focused on community-related factors that affect the elderly, including the effects of community settings and “elderly spaces” (e.g., retirement versus age-heterogeneous communities) on fear of crime, sense of community, quality of life, and neighborhood satisfaction.23 Yet many community studies of older people take place in formal retirement settings.24 Although retirement community studies are enlightening, it is common for senior citizens to be “stayers,” many of whom co-reside with blacks.25 The stayers and pioneers of Parkmont share a common desire to have control over their moving decisions and lifestyles. For the majority of residents, living in this racially changing community is the result of a careful consideration of residential choices and a sense of ownership over their role as primary decision makers for themselves and their families.

The Realization of Mobility Preferences: The Role of Agency

The decision whether to move or to stay after white flight is just that: a decision. Researchers have long held that when making mobility decisions, residents weigh both the economic and noneconomic benefits and costs of moving by taking a good, hard look at where they live and what their other destination options are.26 Yet scholarly literature and urban planning materials often take a passive tone when it comes to white flight, depicting such neighborhoods as naturally changing places where younger whites have simply moved on or “drifted away.”27 The view that racial aspects of white out-migration are of minimal import was echoed in an interview I conducted with a member of the city’s planning commission. After listening to his comments about the prosperity of Parkmont and the “absolute minimum of problems” there, I asked about the obvious elephant in the room, Parkmont’s racial change, and questioned him about why it had occurred. The city planner dismissed the topic, saying that Parkmont’s racial change was “just migration patterns of people in this city.”

These more passive formulations of the motives behind white flight are similar to ideas put forth by sociology’s human ecology perspective, a paradigm that draws parallels between urban patterns and those processes that occur in the natural world (e.g., populations invade and dominate neighborhoods in the same manner that different species of plant or animal life compete to dominate habitats). Though today it is complemented by other theoretical points of view (e.g., new urban sociology or political economy),28 human ecology continues to be an influential perspective and promotes the idea that the white suburbanization patterns are fully explained by “simple racial succession” factors related to variations in local housing stock and racial differences in housing affordability.29

As far as elderly white stayers’ choices are concerned, sociological models of white flight that are grounded in the human ecology perspective suggest that whites who remain in a community after a racial transition are there because they are economically disadvantaged. These whites are left behind by their counterparts who are better able to compete to realize the typical preference among whites to live in a majority-white neighborhood.

In addition to the economic competitiveness explanation for why some whites are left behind after white flight, it is also important to note that across many cultures, both Western and non-Western, societies hold negative stereotypes about the elderly, and people often pity them.30 A common conception of older people, and one that is reinforced in popular culture and media, is that they are vulnerable in terms of their risk of suffering from health problems, injury, isolation, and criminal victimization. This characterization may be extended and applied to older people’s mobility decisions. Stereotypes of the elderly as submissive, fragile, childlike, and passive31 may also be reasons that this group is neglected or painted with too broad a brush in urban research on white flight and neighborhood transitions.

Like their white counterparts, black pioneers make decisions about where to live. Neighborhood integration partially occurs because of a process of self-selection by which the members of a minority group who have the resources and preference to live in a predominantly white or integrated community act to make it happen. On a structural level, when nonpoor black residents choose to exit ghettos, they take part in the creation, maintenance, and reproduction of community social inequalities.32 However, for blacks living in segregated cities, the decision to move is a struggle for family survival, and the move to a white community holds the promise of better schools, less crime and disorder, and increased wealth, as well as social integration and social capital for children in the form of more normalized and frequent contacts with people outside of their own ethnic group. Yet unlike whites, who move in order to access better circumstances in other white neighborhoods, black pioneers’ mobility decisions are complicated by the move across racial lines. This has the potential to create dissociation between some aspects of the new neighborhood cultural milieu, where pioneers may share common ground with whites but must also contend with the politically and socially charged issue of racial identity. Because of this possible dissociation between racial identity and aspects of culture, the way pioneers experience community integration and later resegregation calls for an in-depth cultural understanding of the role of agency, in combination with structural constraints.

Since the 1970s, a growing number of urban scholars have departed from the strict ecological and life-cycle models of demographic change, emphasizing the need to more deeply understand the role of agency, racial preferences, and decision making as key aspects of residential life.33 An exciting stream of qualitative urban community studies has focused on low-income populations and long-time black communities, documenting the ways that residents themselves understand their neighborhoods.34 This research has provided insights into the diverse cultures and subcultures that characterize neighborhood life and citizens’ active participation in their residential worlds, but the experience of white flight has not been a central topic of such investigations. Segregation scholarship asserts that in-depth interviews are a crucial research step for understanding how groups understand, justify, and experience their residential preferences.35 At the same time that researchers want to better understand the role of choice in where people move, we must also acknowledge that few people desire or can afford to constantly change neighborhoods. In the wake of their choice to live in Parkmont, stayers and pioneers have learned that their agency is not inexhaustible, and that they have to live with what happens next.

Pioneers Taking the Leap: A Practical Transition and the Search for Integration

Many of Parkmont’s pioneers have municipal jobs or else work in health care. Despite these relatively good jobs, one pioneer told me that many struggle a bit with expenses depending on “whether they have one or two incomes in the house.” Before moving to Parkmont, when pioneers first initiated the search for new homes in better communities, many worried about their chances of finding a desirable neighborhood that would be located in the city for their jobs and that also would fit their need to adhere to a tight budget.

A typical pioneer story is that of Anne Jackson, a fifty-five-year-old operating room nurse and a mother of three. In 1996, she moved to Parkmont with her husband and her daughter, Carla. Carla, now twenty-four, is a social worker. She and her newborn baby continue to live with Anne. In the living room, I held Anne’s granddaughter and listened as Anne explained her decision to “to take the leap” into homeownership in Parkmont. Financially, it was a bit of a stretch for them, but she felt ready to take the chance that they could get by. Anne described her opinion of the people in her old neighborhood and whether they had the ability to make the same move: “I think it was a choice. They didn’t know if they could make it financially. It’s just a chance you have to take, and I knew that I could. Financially, I could just afford to buy the house, and I was ecstatic and happy about that.”

As Anne has indicated, many pioneers had to stretch their finances to buy a home in Parkmont. For instance, many reported that Parkmont would have been an impossible destination without the option of tapping into mortgage programs and incentives provided by the military or their jobs. Most pioneers avoided the worst pitfalls of predatory lending, and many lamented to me that they had not qualified for the programs that target low-income, first-time homeowners. In buying a home, it was common for pioneers to have confined their search to the city limits since many have jobs that require them to reside in city neighborhoods. Even those who were not constrained in this way were still tied to the city by their practical need to be close to family and friends, as well as their jobs and churches. And for some pioneers, city neighborhoods provided the only affordable option for housing that they could even imagine.

When I first met Erma Williams, the sixty-seven-year-old working nurse had been living in her immaculate Parkmont row house for ten years. She moved to Parkmont alone, but has since taken in her elderly mother, a common lifestyle transition among Parkmont’s black families. As a young woman, Erma was a single mother who later got married and bought her own house, but when her marriage ended she went back to renting in a black neighborhood. Located close to her job and shopping and stocked with affordable houses, Parkmont seemed like a good investment and offered the peaceful, orderly environment she wanted:

I liked this neighborhood because it was close to work for me, so it was easy to get back and forth to work. So this neighborhood was important to me. I just drove around and used a realtor. It was convenient for work, and you had shopping that wasn’t too far away and a couple of restaurants…. I just thought it was a good choice because I was living alone at the time. My old neighborhood was different. If you’re thinking about buying a home, then you want something that is going to appreciate in value. And I thought, since my old area was an older neighborhood, the houses here would hold value a little bit longer than a house would back there…. It was the right price, and that just sealed the deal. I like the look of the neighborhood, how people try to keep their properties up. I like the back where there’s no people around you. And guess what? I’ve been here ten years, and I’ve never been to that creek, but people walk down there!

In the past few decades, the city’s neighborhoods seem to have divided into two groups. There are the white or integrated areas that have gentrified and are now sprinkled with trendy stores, cafés, restaurants, bars, and condos. The properties in such neighborhoods can be prohibitively expensive, less family-friendly, and are usually off the radars of urban working-class blacks. The other prominent neighborhood type is the black segregated neighborhood that is plagued by poor schools, violent crime, physical decay, and abandonment. These are the neighborhoods from which pioneers are fleeing or are trying to avoid. It is in this housing climate that many of the city’s black working-class citizens search for homes. With good jobs, close-knit families, and high hopes, pioneers carefully managed their finances to buy a home in a better place. So when large numbers of Parkmont houses went on the market and a few black families began moving in, the working-class blacks in nearby segregated communities took notice. This cohort of pioneers drove around on their own and with realtors and would happen upon “for sale” signs.36 Then, usually through traditional mortgages, mortgage assistance programs that target members of the former or active military, or through “good neighbor next door” programs aimed at those who hold public servant jobs in the city (e.g., teacher, law enforcement officer, firefighter, EMT, and nurse), pioneers would begin the process of purchasing their first homes.

Pioneers were well aware that they were entering a white neighborhood, and for many, the choice of Parkmont was explicitly tied to the desire to raise their children in an integrated environment. Janice O’Neil, a thirty-seven-year-old nurse, moved to Parkmont with her husband, a heavy equipment operator who works for the city. Now a divorced mother of two, Janice personifies the views of many pioneer parents. Here, she described the role of racial composition in selecting Parkmont as a destination:

It was all white…. A lot of it is white flight, which is bad because part of the reason—when I’ve chosen or looked for places to settle down—I wanted a mixed neighborhood. I didn’t want my kids in a predominantly black neighborhood because the world isn’t predominantly black. I felt like they needed to interact with people of other ethnicities without feeling intimidated or anything. I wanted to move somewhere that was mixed.

It is noteworthy that Janice moved to Parkmont in the late 1990s after many pioneers had already arrived. By then, there was a visible black presence in the homes, at the school, and on the strip where they patronized businesses and waited for the bus to go downtown. The importance of an apparent black population in attracting black residents is notable given that research on residential preferences shows that blacks are especially open to moving into white neighborhoods when their group is already represented in nontrivial numbers.37 More highly educated blacks such as Janice (e.g., those with more than a high school degree), who are opposed to living in segregated black neighborhoods, commonly cite “diversity” and living with a “mixture” as reasons for their preference for neighborhood integration.38

In explaining their reasons for choosing Parkmont, pioneers Lamar and Clarice Nellis also highlighted the significance of teaching their son to feel socially and culturally comfortable with both blacks and whites. Lamar discussed his family’s decision to move to a white community and the importance that he and his wife place on teaching their son to successfully adapt to or “sway” in white environments. This concept of swaying or “cross-cultural code-switching”39 refers to the ability of individuals to intentionally modify their behaviors to accommodate social norms in new settings. Lamar elaborated:

I feel that he should be exposed to certain elements because of the world we live in. But it’s up to us, as parents, to teach him the difference. I’ll put this out there, being African American, you have to understand how to sway. It’s difficult. It’s downright hard understanding the whole cultural aspect of it, and then understanding the terminology, understanding the code of ethics. I want him to have the best of both worlds.

One Sunday, I interviewed pioneer Nina Jones, a thirty-year-old first-grade teacher at Lombard. On her day off, she was wearing a colorful headscarf to protect her hairstyle until she was ready to go out. She is now married and has a baby son, but like many black women in Parkmont, she first purchased her home when she was still single. In general, the pioneers are distinct from the second wave of black Parkmont residents because they arrived in Parkmont with the knowledge that it was an integrating neighborhood that was recently all white. Many, like Nina, reported that the prospect of racial integration was a key feature that attracted them to the community:

I don’t want to just be in an all-black neighborhood. I guess from me just growing up, coming down here for school. Where we were, at the time, Westside, was all-black, and then you come up here. It was nice. It was a nice mix. And then I went to a mixed college…. I definitely want my son to be in an integrated area because that’s the way of the world. When he gets older, he needs to be able to interact with everybody, and it’s all different types of people. You can have the nicest white person, and you get the nastiest black person. But he needs to be able to know how to deal with all of them, and I want him in a place that’s like that.

From the beginning, Nina wanted to live in an integrated community. She was excited about moving to Parkmont, a neighborhood she has known since she was eleven years old when she was bused in as a student to attend Lombard from fifth though twelfth grades. Nina’s mother, also a teacher, carefully watched over her and made special efforts to send her to Lombard: “My mom didn’t let me play outside. I was in the house, in the books, doing crafts.” Nina was eager to start her career and teach at her alma mater, but finding an affordable home in an integrated community was difficult. As a public school teacher in the city, she was forced by the school district’s residency requirements to purchase a home in a city neighborhood. For a single black woman just beginning a career as a teacher, few affordable integrated neighborhoods were available to Nina in the city, and, other than Parkmont, none was located near Lombard.

Joy Parker, a forty-two-year-old Jamaican “dietary hostess” at a hospital, moved to Parkmont from a nearby black segregated area to achieve social mobility, which to her, meant integration:

I was living with my mama at that time, so I grew older, and I got out on my own…. Nobody want to live in that same neighborhood. They wanna go higher. In fact, I’m trying to go to [the suburbs] now. Oh, I would love to. I want to go to different neighborhoods, better neighborhoods. After a while, it’s going to be all-black around here.

When I asked Joy to elaborate on her concerns about Parkmont becoming an all-black neighborhood, she explained her suspicion that racial segregation leads to crime and a lack of neighbor involvement, which she fears could eventually take over in Parkmont.

During my interview with forty-two-year-old Sonya McCall, a postal worker and single mother, five family members sat around a large-screen television, enjoying the discussion of the changes they have observed in Parkmont. Sonya purchased her home from a young white couple with a child. She now lives in Parkmont with her daughter and her elderly father, who moved in after his wife passed away and he was diagnosed with cancer and diabetes. Like many pioneers, Sonya sought to raise her daughter in an integrated environment, which she equates with better schools. Even though Sonya originally lived very close by in a black segregated community, Parkmont once seemed a world away to her:

I thought it would be a little better than my old neighborhood. I have one daughter, and I thought the school system would be better. As far as raising her up, I thought it would be better to just bring her up in a racial [integrated] neighborhood, instead of just all black…. Everything seemed so far ’cause I had never been up here, and I was like, “Oh, this looks like a nice neighborhood.” My friend said, “It’s out of the way. I think you need to move up there.” And when she moved, that’s when I seen like a couple of blacks, and I said, “Okay.”

On the topic of white flight, all of the pioneers I interviewed said they were disturbed by Parkmont’s rapid loss of white population. However, for some, like Erma Williams, the older nurse mentioned in the beginning of this chapter, race was more incidental. Like so many pioneers, Erma knew very few facts about the attractive, integrated neighborhood. She was bothered by the racial change, but reported that her advanced age and lack of school-aged children made it less of a concern than was true for other pioneer families. Much of the research on black housing in cities emphasizes the role of institutional discrimination as a cause of segregated housing outcomes, but the findings in Parkmont add to our knowledge by pointing to the importance of the dual processes of white flight and pioneers’ conscious but constrained decision making. Many pioneers have jobs that force them to live in the city, and to the best of their knowledge they have selected a neighborhood that meets their criteria as far as convenience to family and work, safety, schools, and affordability. Those who have jobs that allow them to live in the suburbs either believe that they cannot afford such a move, find the commute to the city to be too cumbersome, or in many cases they simply prefer to be closer to their social networks in the city. The importance of social networks is notable for working-class blacks and striving blacks in general, who are more likely than similar whites to have low-income family members and elderly parents needing their assistance on a regular basis.40 With their work constraints, family obligations, and greater sense of collectivism, pioneers often make decisions that are distinct from those that whites with similar incomes might make.

Like the pioneers, the whites who remained in Parkmont have their own story to tell. Within their social circles, the choice to stay in an integrating neighborhood was not a popular one. In this way, pioneers and stayers share a common experience: they selected Parkmont with purpose, watched it change, and then adapted.

Stayers Overcoming the Pressure to Move and Dealing with Racialized Crime Concerns

The United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (1999) has reported that, on average, elderly Americans are “among the best housed citizens.” The report noted that most live in good homes that are affordable and in their preferred neighborhood, and it stated that most elderly people in the United States have the financial means to address housing problems as they arise. When asked why they chose to stay when so many of their neighbors were moving, some of Parkmont’s stayers mentioned concerns about finances. However, a closer look at their responses showed that money was only one reason underlying the decision to remain in Parkmont, and it was not necessarily the most importantone.

Aaron and Roberta Schneider, two “originals,” provided me with a detailed list of explanations for their decision to stay in Parkmont. Both are concerned about their finances, but they also listed many other reasons for staying. Age presents a barrier. Like most stayers, Roberta and Aaron are more than eighty years old, and having lived in Parkmont for their entire adult lives, they feel too old to move. Their particular housing preferences also play a role in the decision to stay. They dislike the idea of apartment living, citing their use of the outdoor space in front of their home as antithetical to life in a condo. Many stayers demonstrated great pride in the rooms in their homes, the upkeep of their yards and patio spaces, and the treasured elements of décor that they would have to abandon were they to move to a small space. As with most stayers, the fact that the Schneiders viewed their housing situation in Parkmont as optimal is an important consideration in their decision to stay. Stayers’ satisfaction with Parkmont also stemmed from their observing the outcomes of their friends and former neighbors. Many stayers reported that even now, years after the start of white flight, they continue to hear horror stories of regret from elderly movers who were living miserable lives of dependence and loss of control in retirement communities. Stayers often believed that the elderly people who left the neighborhood were filled with regret, and they boasted that many “leavers” have continued to visit, finding that Parkmont has remained a viable community for errands and shopping. These nonfinancial considerations have all validated the stayers’ decisions to age in place.

Muffy Nussbaum described the pressure on her to move, but said that she has stayed because she loves her home and wants to maintain continuity in her lifestyle. Though financial affairs are often on her mind, she claimed that she really could afford to leave Parkmont. The problem is that any move from Parkmont would not be on her own terms:

It’s mine, and I am living within my means, and I like my little house. At this moment, I’m not thinking about moving because I don’t know what the future is gonna bring with my job at the synagogue. My family kept asking me [about moving], and I finally got the courage to say, “This is where I can afford to live.” If I could afford to live downtown, I would. Of course, I really could afford it, but then I would have to change my lifestyle—theater, dinner out.

According to Sadie Underwood, aged ninety, stayers often have the financial means to move, but simply prefer not to. Though she mentioned her own budget concerns as a hindrance to moving, Sadie said that she is planning to make the move soon because of her desire to be near extended family:

I was thinking I would go to the [local retirement home]. They give you one meal, a dinner. But if I go there, I have nobody. I would be alone because my family lives an hour from here. If I move near them, I’ll have my family. They feel that if I’m closer to them, I’ll get out more because they’ll see that I get out.

Sadie went on to identify some elderly neighbors who have not moved and some who have, explaining the complexities of their reasoning:

Joanne isn’t doing so good, but she said she’s gonna die over here. She could—in all due respect—be in a nice retirement home. She has the means. I couldn’t go to a facility like she could afford, but hopefully I will go to one, and probably it will be nearby. Leo and Gladys, I think they could afford to go, but I think they want to stay…. Mrs. Brody, she just moved around a month ago to an apartment house not far from here. When her neighbor moved, I don’t think she wanted to stay. And her sons didn’t want her to stay here, especially if her neighbor wasn’t there because she lived by herself. And she wasn’t in the best of health either.

Some elderly stayers on fixed incomes have been priced out of the housing and neighborhood options that might have been appealing enough to draw them away from their homes and community. Even so, many stayers had housing choices outside of Parkmont within their reach, but instead chose to remain at home. In sum, the role of finances should not be minimized, but economic constraints are only a small part of the story for stayers, most of whom have the means to live in a “whiter” place. In fact, for many staying in Parkmont was not a sad fate, but a hard-won victory. Nearly all of the stayers in Parkmont have overcome enormous amounts of pressure to move. In general, the stayers’ adult children were the key source of this pressure. On many occasions, I informally talked to the stayers’ children; usually, they would interrogate me for a while, fearful that I was an intruder, salesperson, or scam artist seeking to take advantage of their elderly parents. Many adult children seemed to feel guilty or embarrassed about their white elderly parents living alone in a black neighborhood. The adult children who live out of state are less able to easily check up on their frail, elderly parents and were especially vocal about wanting them to move out of Parkmont. In addition to fears about their parents falling down or becoming ill, they worried about vulnerability to scams and criminal victimization. For instance, on several occasions protective adult children would initially try to intervene during my interview sessions. In such instances, they would interrogate me about my motives, and many times they would attempt to silence their parents in some way, editing, interrupting, correcting, and censoring the stayers’ responses to my questions.

Rose Berger used the word “it” to refer to the coded language she uses when she guardedly discusses the familiar topic of moving from Parkmont:

My sons said, “Let’s talk about ‘it.’” I said, “Well, what do you have to say to us?” And that’s when they said, “You should think about it.” So I said to them, “What is it that you’re going to tell us?” And the older son said he wants to get some information for us. And I said, “That’s all right. You can get information.” But I said, “Just bear in mind, my checkbook is locked away, and I’m not signing anything.”

Despite urgings from loved ones, nearly all of the stayers I met told me several stories about how they have actively resisted the pressure to move. Rena Grubman was not one to sugarcoat the challenges of aging in Parkmont, but she told me that her sons’ nagging has only made aging in place worse. Although she appreciates their good intentions, she said that staving off her sons is an additional and unnecessary burden when she simply wants to maintain the routines of her life: “I’m lucky that I have friends that don’t mind picking me up to play bridge and shop…. Both sons wanted me to move because they were afraid of the steps and want me to be in an apartment and with other people my age to socialize more.”

Some stayers have not experienced a great deal of family pressure yet, but that does not stop them from fearing that their children will involuntarily extract them from Parkmont. To avoid potential confrontations about moving, many stayers have devised defensive strategies for interacting with their adult children. These often involve maintaining a veil of secrecy about anything that might cause their children to question their ability to live alone, such as problems with their home or their health. When asked if her son has ever pressured her to move, one stayer described how she dodges her son’s potential imposition: “I’m very independent. I never complain to him. I just had a cataract operation. I didn’t even tell him until it was over with. ’Cause a lot of my friends, they call their children, kvetching [the Yiddish word for complaining] or whatever. I would never do that.”

However powerful their children’s pressure to move has been, the insistence that Parkmont has become an inappropriate home for white elderly people extends far beyond concerned family members. Friends and former neighbors have been actively interested in stayers’ residential choices and are extremely vocal in their disapproval of stayers’ decisions to remain in Parkmont, often citing crime and race-based reasons.

Nobel laureate Gunnar Myrdal (1944, 622–23) argued that “informal social pressure from whites” plays a key role in residential segregation. When I asked about the decision to stay, elderly residents typically framed their answers in terms of their personal feelings of safety from crime. Since so many of their friends and family members have repeatedly expressed race-based and crime-related fears to them, stayers often assumed that I was concerned about these issues as well. In fact, stayers’ comments intertwined the topics of race and crime so much that the two were analytically inextricable. According to stayers, friends, neighbors, and relatives rarely discussed race in an open manner when trying to convince them to move. Instead, they would try to persuade stayers to move by raising the issue in terms of concerns about health, loneliness, and crime. As evidence of the duplicity of their loved ones, stayers often cited the timing of their loved ones’ sudden interest. Why had they become concerned just as blacks started moving in? Why had they started pressuring them to move away when stayers were still in good health and their spouses remained alive? With the population change so visible in the complexions of the residents, stayers had many discussions about race over the years, and they insisted that the pressure to move was anchored to racialized views about crime.

Dolores Duskin is seventy-two, and like many stayers she described friends who tried to convince her and her eighty-nine-year-old husband, Warren, to move. She detailed her friends’ remarks, which she believes connect Parkmont’s racial change to a fear of crime:

I hear them saying, “You should not be there.” They don’t like us living here. My old neighbor said something about that. I don’t even think he likes to come to Parkmont because he never comes now, and he will not go downtown. It annoys me because there’s nothing wrong with the neighborhood that I see. If the conditions were terrible over here, I wouldn’t be here. We hear about crime occasionally in the neighborhood. Occasionally. Chitter chatter.

Parkmont’s elderly stayers frequently reported that they found the disapproving comments about their longtime community to be insulting. They believe that their friends’ concerns are unfounded and racially motivated. Many stayers acknowledged that they had altered their lifestyles in response to stories they had heard about crimes in the neighborhood, but very few reported that serious violence was a source of worry. Gerri Holtzman described her friends’ fears as irrational, and offered a typical view that illustrates stayers’ determination to adapt to the changes in the neighborhood environment while dealing with the increased feelings of vulnerability that have accompanied aging:

There’s a lot of people that moved away that won’t come to Parkmont. They’re afraid. It’s amazing. There is some crime. In the row of stores where the strip is, a woman from the condos went to a cleaning establishment there, and she was knocked down, and her bag was stolen. So, my friend that lives at the condos is afraid to use it. I said, “There’s crimes all over. Why should you feel afraid to come here?” Well, I live differently, too. When I come home, if I’m going out at night, I take my charge card and any checks in my pocketbook. I feel that if anything happens—because there are times—it happens. It happens everywhere. My car was stolen twice, too. My friend’s car was stolen from here. She wouldn’t come back after that.

Similarly, eighty-two-year-old “original” resident Aaron Schneider emphasized that as he aged and the city’s crime problems worsened, he began to place reasonable limits on his behavior to guard against victimization. However, Aaron also maintained that he is not fearful because the crime in other parts of the city is far more serious, and even then, the crime tends to be intraracial and thus not a threat to whites: “Most of these killings are fights. It’s all between themselves.”

Thus, stayers have not naively buried their heads in the sand, but nor do they live a carefree life in Parkmont. They have adjusted their lifestyles to deal with being older in a changing city neighborhood. Because of the social changes that have occurred in their lifetimes, they perceive crime to be a society-wide problem that is especially severe in cities, but is relatively minor in Parkmont.

A common reaction to their friends’ fears is that “crime is everywhere” and the commission of criminal acts is not restricted to black people and urban neighborhoods. Susan Waxman, whose deceased husband was the cantor (a musical prayer leader during religious services) at the local synagogue, recognized the racial changes in Parkmont, but insisted that the influx of black residents did not translate into danger. She defended Parkmont in a fashion similar to many stayers:

Of course, we are the minority here now. It’s still not a bad neighborhood. There are people that think it’s a bad neighborhood. I understand people don’t frequent the restaurants. I am not comfortable going out late at night by myself, but my street is fine. Look, if your intent is to do bad, it’s just part of your personality. Anyone can hop into a car and go anywhere. You can do bad in the suburbs, too.

Leo Katz’s reaction to the issue of crime in Parkmont was similar to many other stayers: urban crime is inescapable. He has struggled to explain this to his daughter, who has been urging him to move. According to Leo, his desire to stay in his home has persisted despite the fact that his daughter has been “starting in” on him:

My daughter lives in Florida. She wants us there. She started in a couple years ago. She’s worried about us. We have no other family here. We have absolutely nobody. She’s afraid we can get stuck, and there’s just nobody here for us if we fall or whatever, but I like the house, the area. It’s okay. You know, like everywhere, crime’s getting greater.

Why They Stay: Independence, Sentimental Attachment, and Livability

Given the barrage of people who pressure them to move, Parkmont’s stayers have obviously had to carefully consider their decision to stay. Stayers easily articulated a range of “pull” factors that led them to value their life in Parkmont. Perhaps the simplest of these factors is the hassle involved in moving at an advanced age. As Leo Katz explained, moving is “too much trouble,” and staying is “just easier”:

Inertia. The whole prospect of moving is scary. We talk to people who move, and they say if you survive the move, you’re lucky. We ought to be moving someplace. It’s getting difficult to take care of. There’s not much to take care of, but then you begin to neglect things. The house doesn’t look terrible, but it doesn’t look like it should.

Many other elderly whites stay because they enjoy the independence and freedom to come and go. This is especially true for those who drive, as one widowed stayer explained:

I drive. That’s my independence. I go to the supermarket. I take them, too—the ones that live around here. I didn’t always have a car. I had a terrific husband. He would have to take me shopping all the time, and he hated it. He bought me a used car, which was very nice, and he says, “Now, you can go shopping.” And I had my license to drive, and he left the car there, and I was afraid to drive it. It was sitting there for two weeks, and I didn’t use it. I thought, “He means business.” So, I got in it, went around the corner, and I loved it.

For stayers who are still able to drive, Parkmont’s proximity to stores means that they can comfortably limit their driving to short distances during the day and still do errands and be social. As Leo Katz noted: “It’s convenient. We can drive in town. Also, it’s close to stores and shopping. Actually, they closed the supermarket. I used to go there all the time, but they closed that. We’re close to the near suburbs. I am driving, but driving gets more limited.” Several stayers who have remained involved in cultural activities find that Parkmont’s central location makes driving to events more manageable. Leo and Gladys told me the details of their activities:

Gladys: We keep busy. We go to the JCC (Jewish Community Center). There are different programs: opera, art, current affairs, a variety. And the teachers are very good. They’re professors.

Leo: We’re big moviegoers. We like to go in town to the theaters. We drive downtown. We have subscriptions to a couple of theater companies in town and one in the suburbs.

However, for some of the widows who do not drive, Parkmont offers less and less, especially with fewer friends around. As Sadie Underwood said:

At least I can walk around, because I don’t use buses anymore. If I’m okay, I go up to the shopping center, but I can’t always do it. Once in a while, when I’m up to it, I do it. I used to walk it three or four times a day, and it was nothing. And when the supermarket was there? I used to push the cart. It was nothing. The library, that’s my godsend. I never drove because my husband took me everywhere. And my sister, she drove, and my friends all drove, so I never had any problems. Butnow?

Those who do not drive and have no children are more dependent on what is available in Parkmont, and many have been forced to use the new neighborhood businesses that seem foreign to them. For instance, Joanne explained that her local hair salon closed its doors, and she now has to have her hair done at the only beauty salon in walking distance. As we sat outside on the patio, she whispered: “I get my hair done at a black hair salon. I was afraid to go there, and I told them that when I went in. The girl asked why, and I said, “Because I’m white.” You know what? The girl said they never wanted to hear me say that again. They give me free cuts sometimes and won’t take my money.”

At eighty-nine and eighty-seven, Lorna and Abe Rothman were the oldest stayers I interviewed, and they vehemently announced that they had no plans to move. Their home was decorated with family photos, Jewish artifacts, and with teddy bears wearing Jewish symbols, such as the Star of David. Lorna and Abe explained in detail that their home holds many fond memories of marriage, raising children, and activities at the synagogue located a few doors down the block. They discussed the practicality of keeping their beloved home, as well as the ways in which they have adapted their lives in order to extend their remaining time in Parkmont and maintain a sense of independence:

Abe: As the children got older, people moved to apartments. That’s why they’re in condos. They don’t need a house anymore.

Lorna: Basically, we need a house. Our younger son’s in Israel, and his family are in Israel. Our granddaughters come here, and his wife comes here. My older son enjoys coming here with his family. They love coming here because for our boys, this was their home.

Abe: Over the years, for the synagogue, the cantors came to stay here.

Lorna: For holidays. We’re religious. And I love my home. I put a lot into it. The steps did bother me because I had a hip replacement, but now I walk. And if I feel I’m tired, I crawl like a pussycat up and down the steps. I do my own laundry. Sometimes, the cleaning girl will do it, but she’ll always bring it up because I can’t carry a heavy basket with my hip.

Abe: And I’ve learned to do the laundry [laughs].

Lorna: He’s not supposed to carry anything either. I wash it myself. I do my own cooking.

Abe: Yeah. It’s terrific. We’ll invite you over for dinner some night.

R. W.: Any challenges to living alone here?

Lorna: No. Not really. I have a very good neighbor. She’s here forty years. She helps if we need a favor, like for her to take me [to see him] when he’s in the hospital. She took me, but other than that I don’t drive. And we have nice friendships here, and even our Italian woman neighbor is friendly. Yeah, because we’re the old-timers.

Even though stayers have had to adjust their lifestyles both within their homes and within Parkmont, their sentimental attachment to their homes remains strong. For instance, although Sadie Underwood told me that she has scaled back her lifestyle to the point that it is hardly comparable to her younger years in Parkmont, she repeatedly emphasized how much her home has meant to her: “I never wanted to move. Never. I love my home. No matter where I went. We took nice vacations, and when I would come back from a vacation and open my door, I would say to my husband, ‘Home, sweet home.’ I loved my home. I loved it.”

Compared to many other communities, Parkmont has several advantages for those who have decided to age in place. Though many older residents mentioned that they have friends and relatives who drive them places when needed, shop for them, and run their errands, the fact that Parkmont is centrally located and adjacent to the strip makes it ideal for people who have limited transportation options. In general, stayers find that this urban neighborhood meets their needs and makes them feel more empowered and less dependent. Staying in their original homes and neighborhood also accommodates stayers’ need for stability. In addition, their location is close enough to family and friends that they get basic needs met, while minimizing their burden on others and ensuring a continued social life in a setting that is less artificial than a retirement community. Thus, Parkmont is a neighborhood that has allowed these residents to age in place and extend the period of time that they live independently with privacy and control over their personal and home lives.

As Joe mentioned, he frequently walks to the park to play golf. He also strolls to the strip to make purchases from the pharmacy and have breakfast. Rena reported that she enjoys her trips downtown to the theater with friends and participating in a theater group and travel club, but she also attends synagogue functions in the community, eats at the Grapevine diner, and enjoys visits from her son, who teaches at the local school and frequently checks on her. Joanne also spoke of her Parkmont rituals of eating at the Grapevine, shopping at local stores, getting her hair done, and awaiting visits from her younger friend who helps her shop. Both Joanne and Joe especially appreciate the simple pleasure of sitting outside on their patios in warm weather, which gives them opportunities to socialize with neighbors, both old and new. For instance, Joanne, a retired professional dancer and dance instructor, told me how much she looks forward to interacting with the new children who have moved onto the block: “They have boom boxes. I love the music and excitement. I can’t dance anymore, but I tell them what to do, and they dance for me.”

The Two Groups’ Reactions to the Changes

Both the stayers and pioneers actively chose Parkmont to be their home and both seemed pleased that they were able to realize their goals, whether those goals were a continued period of familiar independent living or a better neighborhood that is relatively safe and orderly. However, over time, as Parkmont’s racial change became more complete, resegregation became a source of disappointment for both groups. Since white flight occurred rather quickly, the stayers and the pioneers found themselves trying to make sense of what happened and struggling to understand the ways that racial prejudice has affected their lives and residential aspirations.

Stayers, many of whom have faced continuous criticism for the decision to remain in a black neighborhood, have taken comfort in their experiential knowledge of the truth about the pioneers, which is that they are decent people and good neighbors. Yet they also expressed a sense of loss regarding the close-knit community that had characterized Parkmont for so long. The pioneers’ feelings about Parkmont partially reflect gratitude about being safe from the violence in their old neighborhoods, but they also feel resentful and agitated by white flight, which continues to serve as a very real reminder that both individual and institutional acts of racial discrimination continue to directly impact the most important decisions in their lives. Additionally, as younger people with children, the pioneers could be said to be more future-oriented than the white stayers, who are at the end of their lives. Pioneers know that they have many decades ahead of them in Parkmont, so any threat to their financial investment, personal safety, and quality of life is not taken lightly.

Stayers Recognizing “Nice Blacks”

Speaking about moving caused intense discomfort for many stayers, who often became defensive about their own capabilities and lifestyles, and especially about the character of their new black neighbors. The sensitive nature of the topic of moving was most strongly manifested when I brought up the subject of Parkmont’s racial change during interviews. It was not uncommon in these situations for stayers to outline the numerous ways that pioneers have defied negative stereotypes of black people and residents of black neighborhoods.

Stayers’ positive views about Parkmont’s black residents have bolstered their decisions to stay in the neighborhood. Elderly whites often described their black neighbors as “nice,” and elaborated by providing me with social class indicators of their neighbors’ decency, such as details about their cars, their employment status, their marital status, and where their children attend school. As Aaron Schneider told me:

They’re all working class. And they’re not poor people. I mean, I don’t know what they buy or what they save. They really all have good cars. They’re all working. During the week, it’s plenty of space to park…. And a lot of these kids don’t go to Lombard. I see a lot of school buses. On the other side, next door, she goes to private school.

Lorna and Abe Rothman concurred and mentioned that most black residents have respectable jobs and own well-maintained homes. As Abe said, “Some of them look nicer than the homes when the white people left. New doors, new windows, the lawns are well kept. The blacks are very nice. Professionals, government workers.” Dolores Duskin admitted she has noticed some signs of decline in the appearance of the neighborhood and some blocks seem to be in better condition than others, but she did not attribute these changes to the fact that blacks had moved into the neighborhood. In fact, she expressed an extremely favorable opinion of the pioneers as neighbors: “Those that I know are extremely nice. You should see the lawns! They’re incredible. It’s still nice. The people are so nice. Everybody who walks by you says ‘hello.’ You know them, or you don’t know them, but you say ‘hello.’”

Stayers do not possess a self-conscious pride in their racial tolerance,41 but take a more pragmatic approach to neighborhood change. They believe that those who disapprove of Parkmont are ignorant about the profile of the black population residing there. In their way, stayers do not fit stereotypes of elderly whites, with static, ignorant, and simplistic opinions of blacks. Forced to justify the decision to remain in their homes in a black neighborhood, stayers have given a great deal of thought to race relations in modern urban neighborhoods. Also, stayers’ increased contact with black residents in Parkmont has resulted in an evolving and more nuanced set of views about race. Thus, white elderly stayers view themselves as far more sophisticated and less racist than those who left. This is not to say that they have always promoted racial integration or have not struggled with their own preexisting negative stereotypes of blacks. However, despite intimidation and pressure, stayers rejected the idea that racial change was reason enough to leave their homes.

In general, stayers consider Parkmont’s pioneers to be very respectable citizens. Several researchers have studied the ways that social interaction affects one’s views about respectability.42 Elijah Anderson (1999, 38), referring to the many moral, hardworking blacks in extremely poor communities, framed this kind of labeling of residents as a distinction between families who are “street” (e.g., uneducated and alienated people who embrace a less mainstream set of values about legitimate work, abiding by the law, and moral decision making) and those who are “decent”:

Decent families tend to accept mainstream values more fully than street families, and they attempt to instill them in their children. Probably the most meaningful description of the mission of the decent family, as seen by members and outsiders alike, is to instill “backbone” and a sense of responsibility in its younger members. In their efforts toward this goal, decent parents are much more able and willing to ally themselves with outside institutions such as schools and churches. They value hard work and self-reliance and are willing to sacrifice for their children.

It might seem as if a street/decent distinction about black residents should have been even easier to make in Parkmont because it is not a poor community. However, Leo and Gladys Katz insisted that white outsiders (i.e., friends, relatives, and former neighbors) have great difficulty recognizing the decent nature of the pioneers. As Leo explained:

The racial aspect is there. A lot of people who move, and at the JCC, their attitude is that “I’m not coming over there,” because of the racial situation, because of the fear. I’ve discussed this with people. The fear is people who live here are not going to bother you, but they provide cover for others. In other words, when it was a white neighborhood, if some black hoodlums came wandering down the street, everybody would recognize them. Now, since it’s a black neighborhood, they blend in. You can’t differentiate between the respectable residents and the undesirables. You get that attitude.

Many stayers, like Joe Cassidy, pride themselves on having the savvy and open-mindedness to recognize the social class and cultural diversity within the city’s black population. He explained to me that the more successful blacks are the ones who have moved to Parkmont: “All the whites moved when black people started coming. In the last ten years. There was a scarcity of houses for them, a successful black person. If they make 25 or 30K, they can move out of the ghetto and into a white area.”

At the time of my interview with Lorna and Abe Rothman, Parkmont’s synagogue had not yet closed its doors. Like most stayers, the Rothmans often had to listen to former neighbors’ negative comments about the black presence in Parkmont. In their case, at synagogue or “shul” fellow congregants often expressed their concerns, both publicly and in private. According to the Rothmans, the disapproving comments were usually tied to fears about crime and were rooted in a generalized fear of black people, but these generalizations about black neighborhoods do not match the lived experience of stayers: “People have prejudice from years back. They say it’s gonna become dangerous. I feel safe. In fact, all of the black people that moved in across the street are very friendly.”

The efforts of friends, former neighbors, and family members to persuade stayers to move away tend to fail because they do not see white outsiders as credible or knowledgeable about Parkmont’s pioneers nor about the current day-to-day life in Parkmont. Stayers have continued to live autonomous lives in their own homes and have negotiated relationships with their black neighbors. Theirs is not a stagnant or naïve perspective on race, crime, and social class, so they tend to be dismissive of the worries expressed by their friends and relatives. Rather, stayers’ discussions of their experiences with black residents and their lack of alarm is offered as evidence to outsiders whom they believe have an ignorant, unsophisticated perception of black neighborhoods, Parkmont, and their new black neighbors. Leo Katz elaborated:

You can’t escape the racial aspect. If anybody thinks that racism is disappearing in America, they’re delusional. Jews have been much more genteel. When the blacks moved into the Italian neighborhood down the hill, there were repercussions. One black family moved there and had police protection for six months. I don’t think that Jews are any less racist than Italians. They’re just not likely to be confrontational. They just quietly packed up and left. That’s all.

Indeed, stayers’ satisfaction with their homes and residential experiences necessitates an ability to engage in “urban learning”43 wherein residents acquire and use clues about their neighbors’ appearance, location, and behavior to define situations. Senior citizens, on average, have less tolerant views about a variety of race-related issues,44 but for Parkmont’s stayers, residential integration has encouraged more refined understandings of blacks. Older populations who choose to stay in integrating communities cannot live in peace while simultaneously succumbing to the fears and suspicions of their families and former neighbors.

As retirees, stayers spend more time at home than their younger white counterparts and have had ample opportunity to observe the new neighbors. The appearance of pioneers’ families, homes, clothing, cars, their respectable professions, and the simple fact that pioneers now live in Parkmont were all factors that set the stage for stayers to categorize their black neighbors as good, decent people.

Pioneers Dealing with Racism in Their Own Backyards

I expected people to move out, but not that fast.

—Ken Wilkinson, aged forty-seven

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. I hope this doesn’t hurt your feelings. It was just like the plague, like the plague was coming. Once the blacks started buying here, it’s like the plague. I mean, when we came up here, it was nothing to have ten or twelve “for sale” signs on a block.

—Anne Jackson, aged fifty-five

On a macro-level, suburban development, taxes, suburbanization of jobs, and aging housing stock in the city are all factors that contribute to white flight.45 However, the pioneers are suspicious of people who try to argue that nonracial factors were the main source of Parkmont’s white flight. In general, the pioneers are very sensitive to racial issues and reject the idea that race played a trivial role in white residents’ decisions to flee. As Joy Parker said, the whites “probably think that too much black people moving in. They probably think that it will be a problem.” This is not to say that the pioneers believe that race was the only trigger of white flight, but they suspect that nonracial factors only became critically important to whites when black families began to arrive. As Erma Williams said:

There were “for sale” signs all over the place. You couldn’t go a half a block without “for sale” signs. On this block, there wasn’t that many “for sale” signs, but after I moved here, it was all up and down the block. I knew the neighborhood was in a process of changing, and I knew that it was changing over to African American because the stereotypically white families moved out because they are afraid to live with black families. They think crime will go up and property values will go down. If they would stay and support the neighborhood, I don’t think it would be true. It won’t turn over.

Like Erma, many pioneers blame racial prejudice for white flight, and they report that this is a topic that pioneers frequently discussed as they watched their white neighbors sell their homes.

Sonya McCall mentioned earlier that race was very much on her mind when she arrived in Parkmont. In addition to seeking an integrated environment for her child, she also decided to move here because her old neighborhood was “getting bad,” and she wanted to transition out of her parents’ home. However, after describing the white flight that had taken hold since her arrival, she told me that she now wants to leave Parkmont: “I was the second black on the block here and both my neighbors had ‘for sale’ signs as soon as I moved in. Both neighbors put the ‘for sale’ signs up, but she [gestures to one side] took hers down, and we became friends. So, it has changed. I’ve seen a lot of ‘for sale’ signs now.”

Anne Jackson also asserted that race was the main reason that whites left Parkmont. She told me that other blacks she knows have mentioned Parkmont’s white flight to her in a self-satisfied manner as if to say “I told you so.” Anne said that fear of blacks was the dominant factor in whites’ mobility decisions, but acknowledged that negative perceptions of blacks are associated with whites believing in a slippery slope of “nonracial” neighborhood concerns: “First, there’s race. Then, after race, then the crime comes in. Then, after that, the decaying and destroying of the neighborhood comes in. So rather than stay, they leave.” However, both Anne and her daughter, Carla, view white residents’ fear of blacks as part of the large-scale discrimination that blacks routinely face in public places:46

Carla: I kind of figured it was going to happen. As more blacks came in, the more whites were going to move out. That’s how it is all of our life. If you go on vacation, and there’s a white family in the pool, as soon as a black person steps in, all at a time, they all get out.

Anne: We had a day or something at a spa, and she got in the water and everybody got out. I was like, “Don’t worry about it because now we got the whole pool to ourselves.”

The Persisting Presence of Stayers and Involuntary Moving

It is common for stayers’ ultimate or final relocations away from Parkmont to be involuntary, often preceded by the death of a spouse, a debilitating fall down the steps, or a serious health problem that has limited their driving and physical mobility. For elderly stayers, these are the critical events that prompt a departure from Parkmont, not the presence of black residents. For the many stayers who have not died at home yet, the eventual move will be to a retirement community where most residents are extremely old, are at advanced stages of illness, need mobility assistance and walkers, and where many suffer from compromised cognitive function. Thus, a very common theme among the elderly white stayers’ narratives is their preference to live in their homes in Parkmont rather than the age-segregated institutional settings that await them as they become part of the subgroup of the elderly population that is eighty-five and older.

It is easy to see why stayers prefer aging in place and why they avoid spending their final years in what they view to be an unfamiliar, depressing, decrepit person’s setting. Although many gerontologists view age-segregated communities as a positive form of housing that promotes sociability and feelings of security, this type of residential situation interferes with cross-age social interaction and may actually work to intensify ageist views of older people. Some have even suggested that retirement communities can be seen as an extreme form of residential age segregation.47 In Parkmont, stayers clearly view these kinds of settings as a last resort. To them, retirement communities translate into a disruption of daily life and a loss of connection to the outside world. Rose Berger, a seventy-five-year-old stayer who lives in Parkmont with her husband, described her children’s pressuring her to move out of Parkmont. She explained the rather mundane reasons for her preference for Parkmont over a retirement community:

Our children say, “It’s not safe for you. We want you out of there.” They say, “You shouldn’t be here.” They want us to live in an apartment complex that has what they call “services.” Some of the places have nurses that are on duty if you have an emergency, and they give you bus transportation, or they have cleaning services. And what our sons don’t understand is—and I’ve tried to tell them—as long as we’re happy in our house and we’re living the way we enjoy…. If one day we have a heavy lunch, maybe we just want cornflakes for dinner. Why should we have to go down to a dining room and eat what they tell us? This is just our personal feeling because we don’t really adhere to a schedule. That’s my objection at this present time.

Often, the impetus to move is the loss of a spouse, which is usually very devastating to elderly people who have married young and spent a lifetime together. In Parkmont, as friends and neighbors moved out in the midst of white flight, many older couples carried on, further settling into their home routine and taking comfort in the privileges of marital companionship at an advanced age. Many stayers, like Gerri Holtzman, who moved away from Parkmont during the course of the study, described how a spouse’s illness was the main reason she considered moving:

My husband and I had thought of moving when he got sick. We thought we’d move to an apartment. I felt it was time for us to be in an apartment. In fact, I still tell married couples that reach our age, “Move while there’s two of you.” If one dies, you’re in a place that you have more security, less problems. Things are taken care of for you.

Many stayers reminisced about their recently deceased spouses and the effect of the loss on their home life. Sadie Underwood cried as she showed me photos of her husband and explained the difficulties that she experienced when she became his care taker:

I had so many things, but then when my husband got sick, I couldn’t take care of a lot of things, so I just got rid of them. I couldn’t take care of them because I had to devote time to my husband. [Begins to cry.] Look, he wasn’t young when it happened, but things break down. And then he ended up with a little dementia, which was rough, but I kept him home. I took care of him. He was good, and I have wonderful memories.

Those stayers who have been able to continue to live in Parkmont with their spouses consider themselves to be part of the fortunate few. However, even they were plagued with worries about the future death of their spouse, failing health, and stresses associated with becoming a primary caregiver. To many stayers, losing a spouse translates into a sense that their days in Parkmont are numbered. Leo Katz discussed the way he thinks his wife’s death would affect his residential stability:

As long as there’s the two of us, we’re all right. But ultimately there’s gonna be one of us. At that point, the move will become harder, but also more mandatory. One lady down the block, Rena, lives by herself, but she’s much younger than we are. We’re lucky. We’ve been married sixty-five years.

In the three years during which I conducted interviews, most of the stayers who moved away from Parkmont did so because of their deteriorating health and inability to climb stairs or drive. Morris Barsky, aged ninety, had recently left Parkmont for a nearby retirement community. He discussed the pressures to move from his adult children, his resistance to leaving the neighborhood, and his eventual acquiescence:

I was thinking about coming here for years. I knew this was where I was going to end up. Then my leg gave out. Even though I had an electric chair, they said, “Daddy, you cannot drive the car.” I said, “Well, we’ll see.” And within a couple of weeks, I says, “Okay, come here, and make arrangements.” And before you knew it, I was here. And I’ve been here only about six, seven weeks.

When his family eliminated the car from his life, Morris said, “That was the end.” However, when I summarized his story and said that losing his car made him want to leave Parkmont, he emphatically corrected me. He emphasized that moving was not his preference, but a matter of necessity: “It’s not that I didn’t ‘want.’ I couldn’t. I couldn’t do the shopping. I couldn’t do anything.”

Many stayers provided me with lengthy inventories of their numerous health problems. Even in this community with its accessible stores and extensive public transportation, age has taken a toll on the stayers’ physical mobility. In fact, the ability to get around was more of a concern than crime for most stayers. Dolores Duskin explained: “Steps are hard. My husband doesn’t have a problem, but I have a horrible back. I have every problem imaginable. I have high blood pressure. I’m diabetic.” As Dolores listed her ever-growing physical limitations, she said that she walks far less in the neighborhood now. Notably, crime was never the reason she gave for cutting back on her regular walks to the strip. Rather, she lamented that she can no longer manage the journey up the steep hill that takes her from her home to the business district. Muffy Nussbaum, aged eighty-five, agreed that the difficulties of aging in place take precedence over other factors when trying to understand why older people find themselves leaving Parkmont:

My generation found the same problems I have. As we get older, it’s more difficult to walk steps, and it’s not just a two-story house. We have to go to the basement to do laundry. I think all of them who moved have moved for that reason. As far as race, I am going to be honest and say probably it mattered, but the physical maintenance and walking steps is just as much a reason.

Clearly, my interviews with Parkmont’s stayers reveal that the decision to depart from their beloved community is not a simple matter of individual preference. Rather, the cause of a move is often part of a far sadder story about losing one’s life companion and coping with declining health. These tragedies result in the long-dreaded move, which brings with it a loss of independence that is both sudden and extreme in its impact on stayers’ quality of life.

Decline Watch: The Primacy of Disorder over Crime

The stayers and pioneers both expressed concerns about a process of decline taking place in Parkmont. These worries typically focused on disorder problems, which the residents perceived to be indicative of a larger breakdown in neighborhood social norms. However, with the elderly stayers’ time in Parkmont soon coming to an end, their anxieties about decline especially concentrated on immediate problems of physical and social disorder that they observed. Also, despite a generally positive view of their black neighbors, stayers’ narratives about social disorder revealed that many have experienced strained interactions with blacks when out in the larger community.

Despite the differences in age and ethnicity, the pioneers strongly identify with the stayers in many ways, empathizing with their plight and sharing their distress about the spread of social and physical disorder in Parkmont. At the same time, the pioneers made it clear to me that they resented Parkmont’s white flight, which they viewed as the root of the neighborhood’s recent decline. Pioneers shared a strong belief that the community’s increasing problems are directly the result of earlier years of white flight and the city’s lack of responsiveness to black communities, a category to which Parkmont now belongs. Notably, the pioneers demonstrated a far greater sense of urgency about the signs of decline in Parkmont than the stayers. This makes sense since given that the pioneers have long lives ahead of them and their children’s futures to worry about. They feel that they must carefully monitor the neighborhood and consider both the immediate and long-term implications of community change for their families.

Stayers’ Focus on Physical Disorder and Their Racialized Perceptions of Social Disorder

Urbanist Jane Jacobs (1961) asserted that vital neighborhoods have landmarks to which residents feel deeply attached. However, with such complete and constant population turnover in Parkmont, few meaningful landmarks remain. For instance, Parkmont’s stayers spent a great deal of time with me lamenting the transformation of the shopping district and describing the way it had operated in its heyday. They described the loss of the markers of a strong Jewish community, and, like many pioneers, they complained that the strip has gained a reputation for being cheap or “downscale.” When I specifically asked about what had changed in Parkmont since the onset of white flight, Sadie Underwood echoed the comments of most stayers:

Everything changed. First, your stores. You have very few. You have a lot of take-out stores. You always have the cleaners and the butcher. There’s still the produce place. It’s an Orthodox set-up; the Orthodox buy there. Everything is kosher there. The shopping is different. You name it, you had it here. Now, you don’t have it. Most of it is all take-out. There’s no restaurant anymore. Before, on Saturday nights, a few of the neighbors, we’d all get together. We would go for waffles and ice cream. It was great.

Dolores Duskin agreed that the strip has seen better days. When I asked what it used to look like, she said, “Everything was upscale. Now, it’s downscale. It’s dirty up there. Just a couple of dollar stores compared to beautiful card and gift shops.”

For business owners, white flight and the subsequent changes on the strip were more than distasteful: they had severe consequences for their livelihoods. Louie Romano, a first-generation Italian American and former Parkmont resident, recently closed his custom tailoring shop on the strip. When we first met, he was working on clothing alterations and telling about his plan to close the business. Not only did he mourn the loss of Parkmont’s “upscale” Jewish business environment and the rise of “cheap Chinese stores and take-out places,” but he provided a business owner’s perspective on crime. He, personally, has had several run-ins with serious crime. One time, thieves broke his storefront window and stole his gun from the store. Another time, five men mugged him as he was closing the shop. In addition, he has had problems with trash and littering outside. However, he seemed most upset about social disorder and loitering on the strip (which included the discarded remains of cigar wrappers or “leaves” used to make marijuana “blunts”). To him, the problem had become so extreme that he felt compelled to remove his “sitting bench” that had long been located outside of his shop for the purpose of friendly socializing with customers, residents, and fellow merchants. Louie represents many of the concerned business owners who have fled the strip in that he was extremely focused on both crime and disorder, and was very pessimistic about Parkmont’s future. As Louie spoke to me, Valerie Cross, a pioneer who recently retired from a career with the city’s housing authority, entered the shop with her three grandchildren. They agreed with Louie that Parkmont has recently changed for the worse. Valerie told me she was disappointed that Louie was leaving, but said that she could not blame him since she also was ready to move out: “I wasn’t thinking about what Parkmont would look like in twenty years when I decided to move here in 1998. I see a downward trend. I mean, drug dealing is openly happening on my block.”

Muffy Nussbaum described the changes in the neighborhood’s racial composition, the loss of important institutions, and the downscaling of the strip. Yet she emphasized that she still feels safe, and as Parkmont residents mentioned repeatedly, she takes comfort in the knowledge that crime is everywhere:

It’s all black now. The synagogue membership has gone down. There’s no Hebrew school. The caliber of stores has changed, but we still have drugstores, banks, and a supermarket. You have to drive to the supermarket. It’s five minutes away. We don’t have the lovely shops we had back then. I miss the children’s shop, the gift shop, the women’s shop. Most shopping now is in the suburbs. I have no way to judge, but I would imagine it might go downhill. But I don’t feel frightened as far as crime goes because there’s crime in every area.

In general, the pioneers strongly argued that the increases in disorder go far beyond the business transitions on the strip, and some stayers agreed. Stayers provided examples of social disorder on their blocks that they believed were associated with the new second wave residents, not the pioneers. Janus Kaplan, a white stayer in her seventies, described symbols of disrespect that have interfered with the enjoyment of her home and that make her want tomove:

I’d much rather live in the suburbs. It’s nicer, prettier. It’s quieter, and people seem to have more culture and respect for others. Now, there are loud car radios going up and down the main street. They don’t even have to be in their car. They’d just be standing near it and have their radio blasting. I don’t mean just teenagers. Adults do it, too. I have a neighbor who’s an adult, and she’ll blast her radio so that everything in my house vibrates. You can’t talk on the phone. You can’t hear the TV. You just want to go away and not hear it. And this is a woman who has a grown son and a grandchild. That’s how disrespectful. She doesn’t care. There’s no reason to have your car radio on so loud that the car itself was vibrating. Also, groups of teenage boys just sit around and sit on their patio late at night after 12:00. They don’t care who has to sleep. They make noise, congregate, and loiter.

Very few stayers reported that they possess a general fear of crime and none said that they had personally been victims of violence, but some shared stories about “racial situations”48 in which they felt disrespected and intimidated. For instance, Dolores Duskin found the students from Lombard to be “iffy” and described one negative interaction she had with a group of them:

I was in the pharmacy one day, and there was a girl beside me with her friends. I have no problems with them. When you are standing next to someone to pay, and you’re waiting to be next, where do you look? You look at the other person as to what they’re doing or whatever. Well! Lookin’ at that other person, they put eyes on me as if they were knives! It was scary. When they walked out, I said to the girl who was taking care of the customers, who was black, I said, “Boy, what a piece of crap.” She didn’t say a word. And then I thought, “I don’t know why I said that.”

Sadie Underwood also admitted to having race-based fears when black residents first arrived, but she said that she has become more open-minded over time. Many white residents were reluctant to discuss their initial concerns about black neighbors, whether because of politeness or embarrassment. In fact, although we were alone in her house, Sadie actually whispered when she recalled her fears about the new black neighbors moving into the rental property next door:

Well, now I have a nice neighbor next door, a very nice middle-aged couple. They’re quiet. They’re fine, but the two before that, after my friend moved out? The one wasn’t too friendly, but she had a retarded son, which, look, it’s unfortunate. But, he was like, six feet tall, black as coal. Black as coal. And it frightened me. It scared me. And probably, he wouldn’t harm me, but I had that fear. She lived here around eight months, and I think she didn’t pay her rent or whatever, and the landlord had to put her out.

Pioneers Identifying with Stayers and Blaming White Flight and the Second Wave

Even more than the elderly stayers who are nearing the end of their lives, many pioneers are extremely vigilant about monitoring any signs of neighborhood decline. Although their ability to exercise agency allowed the pioneers to move into Parkmont, they recognize that there are limits. For instance, the pioneers know that they are relatively powerless to stop further population change, to alter the policies and practices of the real estate industry, or to improve the city’s economic and educational opportunities. The pioneers’ uneasiness about signs of decline does not mean that they can instantaneously move at the first sign of problems; rather, there is a time lag. In the period of time between buying a new home and moving away again, they most closely observe the changes in the social environment and plan their next steps. For some, like Joy Parker, the fact of racial change alone is a sufficient cause of concern. She was now waiting for the other shoe to drop in terms of a downward spiral of disorder and crime:

Most of the people are getting older now, so they are moving out. ’Cause that other lady over there moved out and went into a retirement home, and a black person bought it. So after a while, it’s going to be an all black neighborhood. Then, there is always some problem…. There is always robberies, always mischief…. Not yet though. So far, everybody here is okay. Nobody bother anybody around here. Yeah, and people watch out for one another when they notice. So far.

Sonya McCall also associated black in-migration with neighborhood decline and expressed regrets about ever coming to Parkmont when she said, “Now, we only have maybe two or three whites on the block, where before there was only two blacks on the block. So, it has gotten bad, and I wish I didn’t move around here.” Beyond her concerns about segregation, Sonya said that she has become intimidated by some of the men and boys in Parkmont and said that they contribute to a downward trend in the community. Like many residents, men and women, white and black, young and old, she went so far as to say that she avoids groups of boys and men on the street and thinks that they deter the more desirable potential residents from moving to the neighborhood:

It looks bad. Who wants to move into a neighborhood where you see five or six guys walking and standing out there? That looks really bad. You can’t even go into the store without fifteen of them standing there. If I see three or more people in the store, I’m not taking the chance. Or if you see them walking up and down the street, just standing there, all in a huddle. Who wants to walk by? You would be really scared.

Other pioneers, such as Korrie Dawson, try to look beyond race, instead searching for more concrete signs of a downturn in the neighborhood’s cultural norms of decency. Korrie, a realtor who moved to Parkmont nine years ago, was taking care of her young grandson while her daughter was serving in Iraq. She was also caring for two small girls, a foster child and an adopted child. On the day of the interview, two other grandchildren were at her house visiting, and Korrie was getting the girls ready for a swimming lesson at the local Jewish Community Center (JCC), where her foster child also attended preschool. Surprisingly, Korrie told me that all of the neighbors whom she knows on the block are white and elderly. Perhaps then it makes sense that Korrie expressed empathy with the aging whites and frustrated pioneers who have moved away. She explained that she identifies with residents who are afraid of the “street” style and behavior that are popular among black youth and have now become more visible in Parkmont:

If you look at the news, young black boys with their pants falling all down is enough to make you a little bit nervous. That’s what I try to tell my grandson. I think if they were “hood-acting” whites, they would have felt that way, too. These boys, I don’t know what kind of direction they have.

Like Korrie, many of the pioneers who came to Parkmont when it was first integrating did so to escape the threatening aspects of life in ghetto neighborhoods. When they arrived, they brought with them a desire to fit in to the new community, connect with the longtime residents, and maintain the norms of the neighborhood to which they were first introduced. For many pioneers, adjusting to life in Parkmont was not difficult because moving to this neighborhood had been a major goal and served as a benchmark of success for them. Furthermore, it was obvious to pioneers that Parkmont was preferable to their old neighborhoods as an environment for raising children, and they believed that they had a more in common with the stayers in terms of community and life aspirations than with many of their old neighbors. Thus, when I would tell pioneers that some stayers believed that Parkmont was deteriorating in its appearance and social order, it was very common for them to defend the stayers’ and their perceptions. At first, I interpreted the pioneers’ support of the stayers as a form of general respect for the elderly or deference to specific white neighbors with whom the pioneers were acquainted. However, increasingly it became obvious that most pioneers were not just being charitable or patronizing to a naïve older generation, but actually shared the stayers’ worries about neighborhood change.

As much as they identify with stayers’ concerns about a decline in cultural norms, the pioneers are unwilling to drop the issue of white flight as a cause of decline. Pioneers believe that the loss of a white presence has translated to a decrease in accountability when it comes to local services. Margaret Meadows insisted that the timing of white flight coincided with a decline in the city’s responsiveness to Parkmont residents:

We noticed that as whites left, the services started to dwindle that they had up here. We had to fight with the city to keep our trash in the back. They wanted us to put our trash in the front, and we said “no.” They wanted it so they didn’t have to bring the trucks back there [in the driveway], but it was no problem when this was an all-white neighborhood for them to bring trash trucks back there. It was no problem when we first moved up here.

Anne Jackson also described the deterioration in the quality of a wide range of services. She too blamed white flight:

When we first moved up here, we had a truck that goes past, and puts water down the street, to sweep it down. They don’t do that no more. You should take care of the park because it is a part of the city parks. They used to take care of that. They don’t do that no more. From the school and education part of it, to the upkeep of the neighborhood, all the things. Before, when it was all white, and there were Jews here, they did it. So why would you stop lettin’ the water truck go around and sweep up the street? There’s no reason.

Most pioneers also think that the police have stopped taking Parkmont’s problems seriously. They suspect that police believe that crime, though higher now than when Parkmont was all white, is at an acceptable level for a black community. Anne reported that the police are not as responsive as they were when the community was mostly white. She said that the racial composition of the neighborhood is the main reason for the lack of attention that Parkmont now receives:

I wish that the police in this neighborhood would address the new drug problem that has come into the neighborhood. This neighborhood is really not bad. It don’t have a lot of problems here, so they don’t focus on this neighborhood. They come over here—the drug dealers. The same way they did in my old neighborhood. They stood on the corners and sold drugs and all that. When we came up here it wasn’t like that. When they first noticed those boys on the corner sellin’ drugs, they should’ve stopped it…. If I know about it, I’m gonna report it. It’s not only just the drugs, you know what I mean?

Nina Jones also said that white flight is what has led to poor police responsiveness. She considers herself a model citizen and takes pride in doing her part to call the police when problems arise in the neighborhood. She described her disappointment with the police department’s responsiveness to Parkmont residents, citing a time when she reported a domestic violence incident on her block:

If I hear something or if I see something, and I know it’s not right, I’m calling because I want to be on the safe side. I save a life instead of feel sorry for one if I could have prevented something from happening, so I call. Not that the cops is coming any quicker. They come when they want to come. One day, that lady was over there screaming, and I called. And in like an hour, the screaming had stopped, and he [the woman’s husband] had gone, and here they [the police] come. Like, she could have been dead by now.

Rhonda Hamilton, a sixty-five-year-old school nurse and pioneer who had just moved out of Parkmont, had this to say about the decline in police protection:

It used to be, we had a police officer that patrolled the strip and the shop owners and all. As of last year, we never saw another one. It’s like they don’t care anymore. You know? The district doesn’t do it, or they just can’t afford to send someone out. But we once had an officer and the shop owners felt a little safer. We knew his face, and there was someone all the time.

Pioneers and stayers have the shared experience of actively choosing Parkmont, though for different reasons. Parkmont’s pioneers have stretched their finances to move to an unfamiliar place surrounded by strangers. Many had the goal of living in an integrated community, and all sought to escape dangerous and stifling living environments. Like the pioneers, the stayers have also overcome obstacles to continue to live in Parkmont. As the stayers see it, their decision to continue to reside in Parkmont, even in the face of so much pressure to leave, ought to demonstrate to younger people that they are competent and independent. To stayers, there are trade-offs in moving away, and they are not yet ready to make those sacrifices. In their eyes, living in a retirement community is a threat to their independent identity and actual freedom, and they fear that such a move may strain their mental, physical, and emotional well-being. Given that the stayers respect the pioneers and believe that minor forms of crime and disorder are a standard part of modern urban life, they hope to stay in their beloved homes for as long as possible.