A NEW
MUNICIPAL AGENCY
In the
mid-1960s it became clear that a group of volunteers could no
longer sustain the level of effort needed to prevent their
neighborhoods from becoming resegregated. In 1967 the group asked
the school board and City Council to form a new municipal agency,
primarily to recruit white buyers for changing neighborhoods.
Creation of a
city agency would make these activities official functions, not
just private manifestations of civic concern. The proposal
triggered much of the same kind of soul-searching that preceded the
formation of the voluntary coalition. Was it right, in the interest
of promoting and maintaining racial diversity, to show housing to
whites and not to blacks in neighborhoods threatened by
resegregation?
Tom Webb,
then a Shaker Heights city councilman, described the council's
approach, "It was our premise that this was not a black issue but a
white issue. We were not trying to keep blacks out. The problem was
not blacks moving in but whites moving out."
The city and
schools established a Housing Office with a budget that reached
$200,000 in 1982 and more than $500,000 in 1990. Funds on that
scale were needed, proponents argued, to counteract what was widely
viewed as a tendency by real estate brokers to practice "racial
steering"—showing homes in some neighborhoods only to blacks
and homes in others only to whites. Real estate brokers operating
in Shaker Heights denied that they were engaged in such
practices.
The Housing
Office competed for real estate listings in racially changing
neighborhoods, and it particularly sought out white families to
whom it could show the houses in those neighborhoods. Perhaps
because it operated on the assumption that few black families could
afford homes in North Shaker, where prices then often exceeded
$250,000, the agency seldom looked for opportunities to perform the
same service for blacks who might be inclined to move to
predominantly white neighborhoods. The given rationale was that
blacks were underrepresented neither in Shaker Heights as a whole
nor in its school system.