Black Housing, White Finance: African American Housing And Home Ownership In Evanston, Illinois, Before 1940 - Statistical Data Included

Journal of Social History, Winter, 1999 by Andrew Wiese

In Evanston, by contrast, the African American housing market combined both formal and informal features. Formal market agents such as banks, title insurance companies, professional real estate and mortgage brokers, and large speculative builders all participated in the market for African American housing. At the same time, Evanston exhibited informal market features, such as owner building, long-term home construction, and lending by a range of amateurs. Most striking, however, was the active participation of men who were pillars of Evanston's white real estate establishment. [31] A closer look at the housing market in three west side subdivisions illustrates that African Americans in Evanston obtained homes of their own before World War Two through a range of means, some of which are only hinted at in the existing literature. [32]

Transition of Existing Neighborhoods

As Evanston's African American community grew during the Great Migration, the supply of housing available to blacks grew in two familiar ways: through the transfer of old housing in existing neighborhoods and through new construction. As in central cities, the most common means of housing expansion was racial transition of existing houses and apartments. The process of change on Ayars Place, a block-long street between the railroad and commuter tracks on the near west side, illustrates the process throughout west Evanston. [33] In the late 1910s, Ayars Place was home to an aging population of middle class whites who lived in spacious, if utilitarian, two and three story homes. To the south, these homes abutted the growing African American business district on Emerson Street. [34] As black migration accelerated, pressure for housing on Ayars Place and other all-white streets increased. In 1918, a black minister and his wife broke the color line on Ayars Place, and a racial turnover followed in a matter of yea rs.

According to Cora Watson, whose family arrived next, white neighbors objected to their arrival, but "they couldn't keep us from moving in." "There was this sign on the street," Watson recalled,

"'For Sale.' The whites had a house for sale. I saw it often, when I would get off... the 'El' coming from Chicago. I decided I would just ask, out of curiosity. They tried to get a white buyer, but the family said they would sell to anyone if they had half the money down. I went back to Greenwood [South Carolina] and sold the [family] house to get the money for a down payment." [35]

Watson and her husband, Moses, a carpenter and building contractor, purchased the house for $2,500, agreeing to pay $25 per month to a local trustee who had lent them the rest of the money. By 1920, there were eight black families on Ayars Place. Within two more years, fifteen houses had changed hands, and Ayars Place was 50 percent black. By 1925, African Americans occupied 75 percent of the homes on Ayars Place, and two-thirds of them were home owners. New residents included several black professionals and business owners, but over three-fourths of the newcomers had blue collar occupations, most of them in personal services and unskilled labor. [36] On other streets, whites persisted longer--especially to the west where working class immigrants had built their own homes in the 1910s--but by 1930, African Americans had supplanted most of the whites on Ayars Place and half a dozen other streets nearest the railroad tracks. By 1940, the blocks north of Emerson Street from the railroad to the west edge of town were almost exclusively black. [37]