Some of My Best Friends Are Black

by Tanner Colby

  “So when we came to town we met with this Realtor. We told her what we liked, and she sat down with a map and literally drew big red lines around whole areas and said, ‘Well, you wouldn’t want to live here.’

  “After a few minutes it dawned on us what she was doing, and finally one of us said, ‘No, that is where we want to live.’”

  With three small children, the Hoods moved into a single-family rental on Rockhill, just west of Troost. Ed could walk to work at the university, their oldest daughter started school at Nelson Elementary just a few blocks away, and they became parishioners at St. Francis Xavier, a Catholic parish located just around the corner at Fifty-second and Troost.

  Father Luke Byrne arrived at Xavier in the spring of 1970, and it was clear from the start that something was wrong. A once vibrant church, Xavier was shedding parishioners at an alarming rate; you could almost track it from Sunday to Sunday. Norman Roetert warned Byrne of what was coming his way, and how he had failed to stop it. So Byrne, too, set out to salvage the parish and the neighborhood.

  Xavier had a “social action committee.” It had been formed after the church’s Second Vatican Council with vague intentions of civic involvement, but it wasn’t actually engaged in any at the moment. Byrne approached a young, active parishioner who was also a newly arrived UMKC professor, Pat Jesaitis. Like the Hoods, he’d spent the sixties in lefty academic circles—his were at Oberlin and Harvard—and had come to UMKC to teach. “Father Byrne told me they were having problems with shifting neighborhoods, whites selling out of fear,” Jesaitis says, “and asked if I would pull the committee together to investigate it.” The young professor agreed and reached out to the Xavier people he knew, most significantly the Hoods and Father Jim Bluemeyer, a dean at Rockhurst, a Jesuit university abutting UMKC that was loosely affiliated with Xavier. “I didn’t know anything about redlining or blockbusting,” Jesaitis admits, “but I was good at running meetings.”

  A charismatic leader who pulled people together and got them motivated, Jesaitis corralled his team of parishioners into their first meeting in Rockhurst’s library basement in October of 1970. Very quickly everyone agreed that the transition wasn’t really a parish problem; it was a neighborhood problem. Actually, it was a multineighborhood problem, as the parish stretched over areas like Troostwood and Troost Plateau to the east of Troost, and Crestwood and Rockhill Ridge to the west. To be effective, any solution they created would have to cover the whole area. It would have to hold both sides of Troost together.

  By the very next meeting, the group had evolved into the 49/63 Neighborhood Coalition, drawing its boundaries from Oak to Paseo on the east-west axis, and from Forty-ninth Street to Sixty-third Street north to south, an area of approximately 10,000 residents in 3,200 homes: 77 percent white, 20 percent black, and 3 percent everyone else. Ed Hood volunteered to draw up the incorporation papers. The group’s first formal meeting was held on February 3, 1971. Its stated mission was to “create a nonexploitative real estate market” and to “sustain a multiracial neighborhood where people, regardless of race or color, can find satisfying conditions.” What that actually meant, nobody had a clue. They were making it up as they went along, and the whole seemingly impossible enterprise was straddling the Berlin Wall of Kansas City.

  Many neighborhoods east of Troost had tried and failed to arrest the blockbusting, largely because the working-class families who lived there lacked the skills to do anything effective. But when Bob Wood ran up against 49/63, he was wrestling with a bunch of young, passionate left-wingers determined to fight the good fight. These weren’t your tune in, turn on kind of hippies, either. They were property tax attorneys, PhDs, business owners. “We were out to save the world,” Mary Hood recalls with some nostalgia. But they weren’t really out to save the world, just their homes.

  Once the coalition was established, it attracted residents from day one, people like Gene and Mary Livingston, white holdouts living east of Troost, and Maureen and Gene Hardy, an interracial couple (he is black; she’s white). The coalition started a newsletter. Pat Jesaitis organized block captains. Gene Livingston did the accounting. Father Bluemeyer took the crime and safety committee. In less than a year, the coalition had more than sixty core volunteers. Everyone donated their time, and their monthly budget was however much cash turned up at meetings when they passed the hat.

  The Hoods were given the most important assignment of all: heading up the real estate and housing committee. Its first order of business was to stop the panic selling, first by getting rid of the rampant FOR SALE signs. “They were everywhere,” Ed says. “We did a survey east of Troost, and there was something like ninety of them.”

  “The one who stood out was Bob Wood,” Mary adds. “He had the most.”

  In March, the Hoods organized a meeting with all the real estate agents working in the neighborhood. A lot of screaming and yelling ensued, followed by more meetings of the same. Finally, in June, the coalition got six agents to agree to a three-month moratorium on all yard signs and unwanted solicitations. That October, the agreement was extended indefinitely. In March of 1972, the coalition started its own housing office. Through word of mouth, it quickly became the first resource residents turned to in order to sell or rent their homes. Realtors who’d agreed to stop blockbusting were allowed to list their properties through 49/63, and thus were among the first in line for the legitimate home transactions that occurred. “We appealed to their bottom line,” Mary says. “They would make more money if property values stayed up. ‘Work with us, and you might do better in the long run.’”

  While the yard signs were easy to root out, the late-night solicitations were harder to stop. It fell to the block captains to educate everyone, house by house, and encourage them to report any unwanted threats. The housing office staff took the complaints as they came in, and the offending brokers were contacted and urged to halt such practices in the area. For residents most susceptible to scare tactics, like the elderly, the coalition took another tack. “We had a woman who called,” Ed recalls, “and she was all upset because a guy had come through saying, ‘Listen, I’ll give you five thousand cash right now, but if you wait you’ll only get two.’ Well, the market value of the house was eleven. She was an elderly white woman, and she was scared to death. So the coalition took out two mortgages for the full value of the house, bought it, and then rented it to a younger white family that was willing to stay.” As 49/63’s budget increased with donations and grant money, it started financing other homes in the same manner. The panic began to subside.

  Having shut down the predatory speculators, the 49/63 Coalition now turned its attention to the next greatest threat to the neighborhood’s housing: the 1968 Fair Housing Act.

  In Washington, D.C., the issue of fair housing was radioactive. In 1962, President Kennedy had issued an executive order that “banned” discrimination in publicly subsidized housing, then never lifted a finger to enforce it. President Johnson had worked tirelessly to pass the civil rights and voting rights laws of 1964 and 1965, but as both bills moved through Congress, any measures that dealt with housing or mortgage discrimination were deliberately stripped out. That was the price of getting them through. Critical to the passage of any civil rights legislation was a coalition of Northern Democrats and moderate Republicans, all of whom took the moral high ground on racism alongside Martin Luther King, but only so long as the preacher’s crusade remained fixed on the ignorant crackers of the Deep South. Black people were fine, just not in their voting districts. Once King started making noise in the North, marching in the white Bungalow Belt neighborhoods of Chicago to call for fair housing, those same politicians went running for cover. Starting in the congressional elections of 1966, Republicans, in particular, had begun to bank their entire electoral strategy on securing the emerging white majority that lived in the suburbs.*

  For his entire presidency, LBJ had failed to pass any kind of fair housing law. Then, on April 4, 1968, while leading a
sanitation workers’ strike in Memphis, Tennessee, Martin Luther King was assassinated. Riots broke out in over a hundred cities nationwide, and that crisis gave the president one last ounce of leverage to shove a housing bill through Congress. On April 11, Lyndon Johnson signed the Fair Housing Act into law. It contained specific injunctions against blockbusting and redlining; outlawed the use, or even the implication, of racial bias in advertising for property sales; made it illegal for a broker to engage in “steering” (i.e., making false statements about unit availability to steer black residents in one direction or another); and made it unlawful to not rent or sell property on the basis of color. Once again, however, there was a price to getting it passed: Republicans had attached so many amendments stripping away the bill’s enforcement mechanisms that it was rendered practically worthless.

  Under the Fair Housing Act, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) had no power to investigate violators, and no authority to issue cease and desist orders. HUD could only pursue grievances brought by individual complainants, the statute of limitations on which was 180 days from the date of the alleged offense. HUD also had no authority to impose penalties; it could only refer a matter to the Justice Department for prosecution. In the case of a successful prosecution, punitive damages were capped at one thousand dollars. And the Justice Department was not allowed to take a case if the state where the offense occurred possessed a “substantially equivalent” fair housing law. So if a state had already enacted meaningless housing legislation of its own, the local government’s authority to do nothing superseded the federal government’s authority to do nothing. And so it was in Kansas City. After King’s murder, citing fear of ongoing unrest, the city council passed a hasty resolution saying, essentially, that the municipal housing authority agreed to abide by the regulations of the national Fair Housing Act. Washington had passed a law that did nothing, and Kansas City agreed to follow it.

  Although most parts of the Fair Housing Act did nothing, one part did do something, and did it horribly, horribly wrong. In an effort to remedy the drought of mortgage credit in black neighborhoods, under Section 235 of the act, the FHA was now required to guarantee any mortgage to any person in any neighborhood, with no regard for creditworthiness whatsoever. If the home owner defaulted, the government would insure the lender for all but 1 percent of the interest on the loan. If redlining a neighborhood was bad, some genius decided, the inverse of that must be good. The solution to the drought was a flood.

  Denying someone a mortgage is unjust. Saddling him with a mortgage he can’t afford is worse, and that’s precisely what Section 235 loans did. Up to 1968, the pace of blockbusting had been held to the speed with which brokers could find black applicants who at least had a down payment and maybe a first month’s note. Now, no credit? No problem. The federal government had given Bob Wood an unlimited pool of unregulated, risk-free capital.

  An ambitious speculator might pick up a row of distressed properties at, say, $4,000 a piece, put $500 worth of cosmetic fixes into each, and then turn around and sell them to black families at $14,000 a piece. In extreme cases, some black owners moved in only to discover they’d purchased a home that had already been condemned. By the time blacks either defaulted on or abandoned these worthless properties, the brokers were long gone with their commissions, and whoever was holding the mortgage note (either the bank or often the broker himself) walked away with a reimbursement check from the FHA for the full value of the property. Blockbusting was suddenly more profitable than ever.

  And because 235 loans allowed brokers to scrape the bottom of the socioeconomic barrel, they could go into the ghetto and come back to white neighborhoods with prospects (like Susan Kurtenbach’s new neighbors) who fulfilled all the worst stereotypes that white people already believed. Very soon, in places like Blue Hills, every black family that moved in was assumed to be “a 235er,” a harbinger of the urban blight that was sure to follow. And urban blight did follow, more often than not—not because of black people, but because blockbusters and school boards were tearing the social fabric of these communities to shreds. Federal housing policy was practically designed to create urban blight. Once a 235-financed house was foreclosed on and repossessed by the government, HUD guidelines mandated that the property remain vacant until the government decided what to do with it, a process that could take months or years. Abandoned homes began cropping up all over formerly vibrant communities. They quickly went to seed, attracting vagrancy and crime. Once a neighborhood began that slide, the rest was self-fulfilling. A study that later came out of Congress would describe the 235 program as a recipe for “instant slums.”

  By the fall of 1972, Section 235 loans had infested Blue Hills top to bottom. In Troostwood and Troost Plateau, more than fifty homes had already been sold under the program, with a foreclosure rate that was 20 percent and climbing. The 49/63 Coalition joined with Blue Hills and other neighborhood associations, and together they sued the city and federal housing authorities in an effort to shut the program down. That lawsuit was quickly rendered moot, however, as the 235 program proved to be so disastrous on a national scale that Washington pulled the plug on it anyway.* Lending in black neighborhoods dried up again. The drought returned, leaving these new “instant slums” without the financing they needed to reverse the decline that blockbusting had begun.

  By the early seventies, America’s inner cities had been gutted. In Kansas City, practically everything east of Troost was circling the drain—except for 49/63. In February 1973, after two years of sustained effort, the coalition newsletter reported that virtually all blockbusting activities in the neighborhood had ceased. More than thirty real estate agents had agreed to abide by the neighborhood’s fair-business regulations, and the number of FOR SALE signs east of Troost had dropped from ninety to fourteen. One of the most enthusiastic of these cooperators was Bob Wood. The man wasn’t stupid. If blockbusting no longer produced a profit, he wasn’t going to do it. So he changed his business model. He became a slumlord.

  “During that time,” Gene Hardy says, “nearly every house that somebody moved out of east of Troost, Bob Wood went in and bought it. He wound up owning so many houses that when blacks did move in, he could charge them whatever rent he wanted and they’d pay it just to be there.”

  Everything east of Troost had become prime territory for absentee landlords. A survey conducted by the coalition in the summer of 1972 found fifty abandoned properties on the eastern side of the neighborhood. So a new committee was formed and sent out to document every vacant property’s code violations, which were then reported to the housing authority. Faced with the cost of bringing those houses up to code, the owners of most of them agreed to sell and move on. Responsible tenants were found through the coalition’s listing service. Then, in October of 1973, the coalition petitioned the city to pass a zoning ordinance that would keep houses in 49/63 zoned as single-family residences. With that policy in place, homes couldn’t be chopped up into efficiency units, and the slumlord trade got a lot less lucrative. The vigilance of the coalition made it harder and harder for real estate agents to do anything other than fair and legitimate business.

  The final piece of the puzzle was the mortgage issue. Despite being “banned” by the Fair Housing Act, redlining was still standard practice because it couldn’t be effectively prosecuted; a single rejected loan application wasn’t proof of discrimination, as any number of factors could lead to an individual’s being turned down.* Redlining, as most people understand it, is a byword for discrimination against blacks—and that was certainly the net effect in most cases. But much of the historical data actually shows a U-shaped pattern: high loan availability for whites on one side, lower availability for blacks on the other, but with the lowest availability coming in the middle, in transitional neighborhoods. Mortgage redlining hurt low-income blacks looking to buy in. Insurance redlining hurt existing white residents, who found their rates inexplicably jacked up. In fact, many of the middle-cl
ass whites who wound up in 49/63 initially came to the group because they’d been turned down for home owners’ insurance once black neighbors moved in. White families with good credit who wanted to move into Kansas City had their mortgage applications denied; like the Hoods, they were told to try Johnson County.

  The FHA had yoked urban neighborhoods from one extreme to the other, either withholding credit or opening a floodgate of it. But one idea had actually never been tried: fair credit for qualified applicants. So crazy, it just might work. The 49/63 Coalition got the opportunity to try it in April of 1974 with the arrival of Neighborhood Housing Services (NHS), which had started out as a pilot program in Pittsburgh; its founders came to 49/63 seeking a candidate for expansion. NHS was “a local, not-for-profit organization advocating affordable housing, safe living environments, and community revitalization through a variety of federal, state, and local resources.” Roughly translated, NHS was George Bailey’s Building and Loan Association from the fictional Bedford Falls of Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life; it provided low-interest, nondiscriminatory mortgage credit to the low-income and black applicants shut out by redlining.

  Neighborhood Housing Services even had its own George Bailey: Joe Beckerman. Beckerman had moved to Kansas City from southern Missouri in 1972 to go to law school, and one of his professors, Ed Hood, roped him into serving on 49/63’s code violations committee, which eventually led to a job as president of NHS. Tall and lanky with an aw-shucks demeanor, Beckerman even has a Jimmy Stewart kind of way about him. (And for what it’s worth, J. C. Nichols looked a lot like Old Man Potter.)

  “Neighborhood Housing Services is a partnership of all the people in that demographic area,” Beckerman explains. “It’s residents, city government, and all the businesses you can get. You bring those three diverse groups together and say, ‘Hey, we all have a vested interest here.’” By appealing to that vested interest, NHS raised a pool of operating capital from local businesses and lending institutions, and then assumed the risk of issuing mortgage loans. “We could do anything we wanted with our loans,” Beckerman says, “as long as it made sense.”