It’s one of the oldest stings in the book. Two testers–one black, one white–walk into a real estate office and ask the agent what’s for sale.
Evanston officials express disappointment with the evidence of discrimination. “I guess I shouldn’t be surprised,” says Owen Thomas, executive director of the Human Relations Commission. “Evanston is a heterogeneous community, but it’s not happenstance that 98 percent of the black population lives in west Evanston. We’ve got some realtors in Evanston who play straight up, but we’ve also got some bad apples who have been playing these racial-steering games for a long, long time.”
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Most baffling is that the latest allegations reveal an astounding ignorance on the part of agents from some of Evanston’s premier real estate firms. Evanston is an economically and ethnically integrated community whose real estate market is booming. Yet the charged agents apparently acted as though they thought sections of their community were slums.
Of course, one can only speculate on how agents view the relationship between race and real estate in Evanston, since they won’t talk about it. “I don’t have any idea of what the future real estate market in Evanston is,” says Alan Bigelow, vice president of residential sales for Baird & Warner. “Neither do you, although everyone is entitled to his own opinion.”
Yet when white testers Curt Matlin and Laureen De Temple walked into a Century 21/Shoreline office and asked for houses in the $90,000 price range, the agent allegedly said he had none. An agent from that same office, however, had showed such homes in west Evanston to blacks just a few weeks before.
“It’s not good enough to say ‘Since a lot of people are bigots, we should let agents be bigots,’” Underwood counters. “There are laws against segregation. What we must do is make the penalty against segregation so prohibitive that realtors won’t do it anymore.”
“I realize that displacement could be a problem, but I don’t think we’ll see the kind of massive change that some people talk about,” says Thomas. “We should be pushing integration. I mean real integration, with blacks and whites living on the same block. I know there are blacks who want to live with blacks, just like some whites want to live with whites. But we’ve got to make it clear that race should never be used to stop anyone from living where he wants to. It’s a struggle–there’s so much resistance. But once we get people living together we can dispel a lot of the fears. People can see how much they have in common.”
