Some of My Best Friends Are Black (26 page)

“It’s understandable in a sense because cultures are different and interests are different. People that get highly involved in an organization often do it as a social thing. I got involved because I’m really interested in the growth of our city and crime and drugs and other stuff, but on the other hand, it’s social for me, too. And we have two different cultures
here that, generally speaking, socialize in different ways. We may be friendly with each other, but those that are going to be actively involved in an organization have different ways they wish to do it.”

So is it integrated? Yes and no. The point of 49/63 is not that it’s produced some golden mean of racial balance. It hasn’t. It can’t. The point is that the coalition stepped in, restored a sense of order to the marketplace, and provided for the equal protection of residents’ property rights, creating a stable and open environment. Within that, it’s up to the people who live there. They can either form a community or not form a community.

“My sense is that it’s about choices,” Calvin Williford says. “People are going to gravitate to wherever they gravitate; you’re always going to find clustering. I see government’s role as providing choice and opportunity, making sure that there are no barriers to residential mobility, and that whatever incentives are being granted actually allow people to make choices about where they want to be.” Unfortunately, as Williford has seen though his work in local politics, city hall tends to work just the opposite. It takes choices away. Real communities are fragile, hard to hold together; they ebb and flow with cultural and generational change. That’s not what the people in charge want. Politicians want guaranteed incumbency. They want voting districts with fixed social, racial, and political bearings. Inner-city slumlords want low-income tenants stacked by the square foot to cash in on the easy money of federal housing subsidies. Out in the suburbs, developers want all the high-end, good-credit families clustered, too.

Today, the J. C. Nichols empire has become a wholly owned subsidiary of the disturbingly named HomeServices of America, Inc., a conglomeration of twenty-some different realty companies covering twenty different states. In the early 1990s, the Walt Disney Company broke ground on its very own town, a suburb of Orlando called “Celebration, Florida,” marketed as “a place that takes you back to that time of innocence.” Just like the Country Club District, Celebration is a suburban dream factory manicured down to the last blade of grass. In the twentieth century, Kansas City produced two true geniuses. In the twenty-first century, the visions of J. C. Nichols and Walt Disney have come full circle and joined. “Neighborhoods” are increasingly “developments,” corporate
theme parks. But corporations aren’t interested in the messy ebb and flow of humanity. They want stability and predictable rates of return. And although racial discrimination is no longer a stated policy for real estate brokers and developers, racial and social homogeneity are still firmly embedded in America’s collective idea of stability; that’s what our new corporate landlords are thinking even if they’re not saying it. And as long as black people and white people are still arguing about whose dog crapped on the lawn, why should those companies think any different?

America has lived for decades with this myth that mixing races lowers property values. In fact, the opposite may be true. Some studies from the 1970s showed that mixed-race neighborhoods, if they could stabilize, held their property values better than homogenous ones. If anyone can live in a particular neighborhood, then it has a larger customer base. On top of which, quality mixed-race housing is an incredibly scarce resource. When demand is greater than supply, prices go up. Joe Beckerman bought his place at $25,000, furnished, and now he’s sitting on a quarter million in equity. Other residents attest to home values that have increased five- and tenfold as well. “Best investment I ever made” is a phrase you hear a lot around here. “If I put up a sign listing my house for $140,000,” Calvin Williford says, “I would have an offer in a couple of days. If I put it at $130,000, my phone would ring off the hook. My neighbor sold her house in forty-five minutes.”

Capitalism: it actually works sometimes. If only America would let it.

Before leaving Kansas City, I thumb through the local white pages on a whim and discover, somewhat to my surprise, that I have one last stop to make. I check out of my hotel, drive into town, and head south in search of 7530 Troost Avenue, still listed as the home of Bob Wood Realty.

From the outside, it’s what you’d expect: a run-down, two-story office building. Red brick with a tacked-on facade of columns, the whitewash cracked and peeling. Inside, the cramped hallways are a sad and dingy shade of beige. All the offices seem either closed or vacant, but there’s activity on the second floor. I go up and poke my head into the only room with any lights on. Half-opened boxes line the floor. Bubble-wrapped
shelving units lean against the wall, awaiting assembly. New tenants. Behind the reception desk, a black guy about my age is busy unpacking and setting up a fax machine. “Can I help you?” he asks as I wander in.

“Yeah,” I say. “I’m looking for Bob Wood.”

“The Realtors?” he says. “They’re gone. But I can tell you all about Bob Wood.”

“How’s that?”

“Because I lost my house in a subprime balloon mortgage Bob Wood sold me ten years ago.”

Wood’s been dead a few years now, it turns out, still hanging around the white pages like an infection. The properties he managed in his slumlord days are still around, too—run-down houses that attract marginal tenants and cause headaches for the neighborhood. I talked to some of the neighborhood cops on 49/63’s safety committee, and they say whenever they get a call for a domestic disturbance or some other unpleasantness, odds are good it’s coming from an old Bob Wood house.

Despicable as Wood may be, it’s important to make one small point in the man’s defense: from blockbusting to slumlording to subprime lending, most of what he was doing was perfectly legal at the time he was doing it—not just legal, but explicitly encouraged by the federal government and the real estate industry’s leading trade organization. And even where Wood’s actions were illegal on paper, authorities were purposefully denied the enforcement tools that might have shut him down. The problem was with the housing market and the people we elected to regulate it for us. Bob Wood was just an asshole.

“It takes a long time,” Joe Beckerman says. “As you can see today, it takes generations to get people thinking differently about their fellow man. All the country clubs I’ve ever belonged to, people always say, ‘You live
where
?’ Or, ‘Do I have to bring a gun over there?’ But I tell them I live in a great neighborhood. I’ve got black neighbors, Asian neighbors, a socioeconomic strata from people on food stamps to people that make a quarter of a million dollars a year, and that’s the way the world is. That’s very important to me and my kids, who are very much that way, too. Forget about the neighborhood, it’s about how you think about the other person.”

To sift through the census data for 49/63 and ask “Is the neighborhood integrated?” is to pose the wrong question. The only question you can ask is “Who in the neighborhood has integrated?” Ruth Austin has. Helen Palmer has. The woman with the littering problem has not. A lot of the white folks west of Troost haven’t, either. It’s entirely possible that 49/63 will gentrify, drive out older residents, and lose all its character. It could also backslide into urban decay, sending families with children out the door. The relationships in the neighborhood will decide. “True integration,” as Martin Luther King said, “will be achieved by true neighbors who are willingly obedient to unenforceable obligations.”

If you turn on your television these days, you hear a lot of old white people talking about this “real America,” some apple-pie, Bedford Falls, Walt Disneyfied idea of a simpler country, a “time of innocence” that we’ve lost. They’re right. It’s gone. We destroyed it so we wouldn’t have to share it with black people. We gave up real neighborhoods in real cities so we could pay more to have “protection” inside the regional profit silos of HomeServices of America. We gutted Blue Hills, and now you have to go to Orlando to buy it back. Only that’s the big lie at the heart of the J. C. Nichols dream. Desirable associations aren’t something you can buy. They’re something you have to make.

There’s only one way America’s neighborhoods will begin to integrate: people have to want it more than vested public and corporate interests are opposed to it. And more people should want it. Mixed-race, mixed-income housing is a product we need on the market. It’s the only real solution to segregated schools, for one. So how do you sell that idea to a country still beholden to outdated stereotypes and fears? The same way J. C. Nichols did. You advertise it.

“Some fifty years ago, the late, great Nat King Cole, when Madison Avenue had canceled his groundbreaking TV show, said that Madison Avenue was afraid of the dark. Well, it’s 2009, and dark still ain’t gettin’ it on Madison Avenue.”