A Modest Milestone

After a bitter twelve-day floor fight, the House last week produced a fair-housing bill that gave the Johnson Administration several slices less than half a loaf. The President wanted a law that would forbid racial discrimination in the sale or rental of all housing in the U.S. The House balked at such a sweeping measure. It voted to exempt individual owners who make no more than two sales a year and landlords who rent buildings with no more than four units and live on the premises. The bill thus covers 23 million of the nation's 60 million housing units (only 6,000,000 of them in the suburbs), leaving 60% of all U.S. housing and virtually all private houses unaffected by its provisions. And there are signs that the Senate may refuse to swallow even the remaining two-fifths of the loaf when the bill comes before it next month.

An Inescapable Fact. The open-housing provision is one of the most controversial in years, not only because it affects deeply ingrained feelings for the rights of private property, but because it also promises to affect the North far more profoundly than any previous civil rights measure. Since the 1930s, more than 3,000,000 Southern Negroes have flowed into the major cities of the North and West in a tide that has created ghettos from New York to Los Angeles and prompted white families to move to the suburbs. Though the objections of property owners to the open-housing provision range from doubts about the measure's constitutionality to skepticism about its enforceability, many and perhaps most of them are based on a sad but inescapable fact: Americans as a whole are not yet prepared to live side by side with Negroes in racially mixed communities, and resent pressures to force the Negro on them.

Sponsored by Maryland's Charles McC. Mathias Jr., 44, a liberal Republican serving his third term from a district in which few Negroes reside, the watered-down open-housing provision that finally did pass scared the living daylights out of many Congressmen. With the elections not far off, everyone could recall how California's voters rejected the Rumford fair-housing act by a 2 to 1 margin in 1964, defeating Democratic Senatorial Candidate Pierre Salinger, a Rumford backer, in the process. With Congressmen worried about their constituents' reactions, even the gutted provision could muster only a 179 to 179 tie in a crucial test vote, which then was broken in favor of the open-housing measure by the chairman.

On a Par. The main line of defense for those who oppose open-housing legislation is their contention that it violates the absolute right of property. Senate Republican Leader Everett Dirksen, without whose support the 1964 and 1965 civil rights bills would have been defeated, sincerely considers the housing measure "absolutely unconstitutional" and intends to fight it to the death in the Senate. Even many Northern liberals confess that they are disturbed by the idea of depriving a man of the right to sell his property to anyone he likes. It is an idea that appears to go against the American grain; but the fact is that the concept of unassailable property rights has little support in law or custom.

The often-cited Fifth Amendment applies only to the deprivation of property, and the rights of the property owner over the years have been circumscribed by scores of restrictions, ranging from the state's right of eminent domain to a tangle of local ordinances. The courts seem to agree that the rights of U.S. minorities to compete equally in the housing market stand on a par with the rights of landowners. In tests of some of the fair-housing laws that already exist in 17 states and 31 cities, State Supreme Courts have ruled almost unanimously that the laws are constitutional. Said the Massachusetts Supreme Court: "Neither property rights nor contract rights are absolute. Equally fundamental with the private right is that of the public to regulate it in the common interest."

Panic Peddlers. After the constitutional issue, the most powerful surface argument concerns the pocketbook. "This is largely an economic issue," says Republican Craig Hosmer of California, who opposed Title IV. "A home is the only major asset most people have. Whether it is a fact or not, people fear that when Negroes move in, property values go down."

They do indeed decline if most of the whites in a neighborhood stampede to another area as soon as Negroes begin moving in. The chief profiteer from this process is the "panic peddler" or "blockbuster"--the real estate agent who buys cheap from frightened whites, sells dear to Negroes who cannot buy anywhere else. (Last week's bill specifically prohibited blockbusting by making it unlawful for real estate agents to coax homeowners into selling by alarming them with stories of a Negro influx.) Wherever white residents resist the impulse to get out and cooperate in integrating a Negro family in a neighborhood instead, values not only fail to fall but frequently rise. The first Negro family moved to Baldwin, L.I., eight years ago, and nine soon followed; houses then worth $9,000 are now selling for $17,000, paralleling the general trend in steadily increasing realty values. According to a study of 1,810 neighborhoods in 47 U.S. cities, property values increased in the 1950s, when the Negro middle-class was growing rapidly, by 61% in Negro areas, and by 45% in integrated areas--while they rose 35% in white neighborhoods.

Quotas or Ghettos. Part of the problem, of course, is to persuade Negroes not to inundate one area out of proportion to their 10% share of the population. In the New York suburb of Hempstead, front lawns were forested with FOR SALE signs after the first Negroes arrived, and there were fears that the neighborhood might turn into a suburban ghetto. But calmer residents decided to hang" on. Forming a community association, they saved their hardest sell for prospective white buyers to replace families that had left, urged Negroes to avoid a wholesale rush into the area. Given a choice between a quota and a ghetto, Negroes cooperated. The result: an integrated but balanced community. Across the U.S., more than 500 similar fair-housing committees have been set up to thwart blockbusters.

Many proponents of open housing say that its goal is to break up the slums by dispersing Negroes more evenly throughout the population, but the low-income slum dweller is actually least likely to be affected. He is too often psychologically reluctant to forsake the emotional security of the ghetto and financially incapable of doing so. It is the educated Negro with a middle or upper income who is most eager--and able--to get out of the ghetto and explore the society around him. Actor-Comic Bill Cosby (costar of TV's / Spy) lives in a $70,000 Beverly Hills spread, for example, and Federal Reserve Board Governor Andrew Brimmer in a $55,000 home in Washington's Forest Hills.

Despite the fact that the Negro who does vault from slum to suburb is likely to be the economic and educational peer of his new neighbors, many whites react with unreasoning fear or hostility to the idea of having a Negro next door. Few things have done more to create this attitude than the high incidence of crime and violence in the black ghettos. Moreover, the swift deterioration of some public housing projects occupied by Negroes leads many whites to believe that the arrival of a Negro family is the certain prelude to garbage in the streets, broken windows, cockroaches and rats--even though these conditions are unheard of in such carefully maintained middle-class Negro areas as Chicago's Kingston Green.

"Nigger, Get Out!" Among whites, the fiercest prejudice is found in the lower-income ethnic enclaves where jobs and homes are most immediately threatened by the Negro trying to break out of the ghetto. "We have our own section here," said a storekeeper in South Boston. "Why can't the Negroes be happy in their own area?" Chicago's "white riots" against Negroes who were demonstrating for open housing were fomented largely by first-and second-generation Americans--mostly of Irish, Italian, Swedish and Eastern European ancestry--who have a long history of ethnic animosity.

Distrust and fear are by no means limited to the lower-income groups. As Brooklyn's Democratic Congressman Emanuel Celler, long a champion of civil rights, sees it, the chief problem is "a dislike of the unlike." Says Celler: "The Irish don't like to live among the Poles. It's the same situation." Last month, when A. Gordon Wright, Midwest director of the Commerce Department's Economic Development Administration and the son of a millionaire, moved into exclusive Grosse Pointe, Mich. (median income: $11,200), whites drove past his house screaming, "Nigger, get out!" When Massachusetts' Attorney General and G.O.P. Senatorial Candidate Edward Brooke tried recently to move to Milton, a wealthy suburb of Boston, he was peremptorily turned away; now he lives in Newton, an equally swank suburb.

Often, the opposition to integrated neighborhoods comes from women--particularly in blue-collar areas. While their husbands worry about property devaluation, the women, who must spend most of their time at home, are more concerned with the schooling and safety of their children--and with their own safety. Besides, says Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Katie Louchheim, a former vice chairman of the Democratic National Committee, "Women want a cause."

Changing the Patterns. Negroes themselves have mixed feelings about living alongside whites. "The hell with integration," says former Cleveland Browns Fullback Jimmy Brown, who lives in a largely Negro middle-class Cleveland neighborhood. "Just don't segregate me." But many find decent housing so scarce in Negro neighborhoods that the only choice is to look in white areas, and often they do so with trepidation. A well-to-do Detroit Negro who thought of moving to Grosse Pointe decided against it because "I didn't want garbage on my porch, and I didn't want my children to be called niggers."

Despite all the mistrust, hostility and open hatred that scar relations between white and black, a July Gallup poll showed that only 34% of the whites questioned would consider moving out if Negroes moved next door. Three years ago the figure was 45%. The fact is that few whites are likely to face the problem for years. "If there were open housing all over the nation tomorrow," says Chicago Sociologist Philip Hauser, "it would still take over a generation for the present housing pattern to change. The majority of Negroes don't want to live in white areas, don't want to face the hostility and can't afford higher-income housing."

President Johnson described the truncated housing bill that came out of the House last week as "an important new milestone" toward racial justice. In a sense, that is so. Even though the measure is far less stringent than many state laws, a federal law naturally has far more impact. Nevertheless, the bill is at best a modest milestone, a halting start toward ending what Housing and Urban Development Secretary Robert C. Weaver rightly calls the "most stubborn and universal of the Negro's disadvantages."

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