COOPERATION WITH REAL ESTATE FIRMS

Over the years the pro-integration forces and the major real estate firms in Shaker, Cleveland, and University Heights have generally established a cooperative relationship. The area's largest firm, Realty 1, instructs all its sales people to contact the Shaker Heights Community Services Department and the ESCOC offices when they show a black client a house. For their part, the staff members in all offices—Shaker Heights, Cleveland Heights, and ESCOC—are careful to see that real estate agents get commissions on any sales that ESCOC, through its pro-integration marketing, encourages.

In 1988 a new joint program was established, overseen by a council composed of representatives from the Fund for the Future of Shaker Heights, the Heights Fund, and each participating ESCOC jurisdiction. The joint program, administered through the Shaker Heights Community Services Department, creates new incentives for real estate agents to engage in pro-integration marketing. Three firms (two large predominantly white firms and one smaller black firm) have signed agreements with the program: the firms' agents receive a bonus equal to one-half of one percent of the selling price when they sell houses to buyers whose population group is underrepresented in designated neighborhoods of Shaker Heights, Cleveland Heights, University Heights, and Hillcrest. Half of the bonus (one-quarter of one percent) is provided by the incentive program. The other half of the bonus comes from the real estate firms themselves.

OPEN DOOR WEST

During the three decades in which the eastern suburbs sought to cope with blockbusting, white flight, and racial steering, most residents of the predominantly white western suburbs have remained unperturbed by their own segregated residential situation. Ironically, the first of these communities to consider accepting the counsel of Shaker Heights fair housing advocates was Parma, the city whose state senator sought to block the Ohio Housing Finance Agency's pro-integration set-aside.

Parma, periodically deprived of federal assistance in past years for failing to meet the Department of Housing and Urban Development's antidiscrimination guidelines, is now under a federal court order to end what the court found to be discrimination in its residential patterns. The joint program has offered Parma a shared-cost agreement under which representatives from the pro-integration agencies in Shaker Heights, Cleveland Heights, and the Hillcrest area assist Parma in developing a city-run housing service to attract black buyers and renters to the city and to assist in the formation of financial incentive programs to encourage pro-integration moves.

In May 1990 the City of Parma announced its commitment to work