Oak Park vs. Austin
9th October 2024
Oak Park, IL is a very liberal, quite gay, still quite white suburb of Chicago just over the city line from the bleak Austin ‘hood within Chicago. When Martin Luther King came to Chicago and demanded integrated neighborhoods, Austin was one of the first to tip. Middle class blacks moved in, but they were quickly followed by underclass blacks as the federal government promoted mortgages for minorities in 1968-1972. Crime exploded, the middle class blacks fled, and local real estate agents got rich flipping entire neighborhoods.
Neighboring Oak Park, with its couple of dozen Frank Lloyd Wright homes, had more of a margin for error. It quickly made most streets connecting Oak Park and Austin into culdesacs.
A brilliant innovation was the no doubt illegal but successful “black-a-block” racial quota imposed on realtors to keep Oak Park from tipping all black: the rate of racial change was throttled way back. Realtors could make the score of a lifetime by driving out everybody who lived on a block.