With more than 150 people gathered in the gracious Refectory at Columbus Park last Tuesday evening, the aspiration and exhortation was to work to create a Greater West Side community that would unite Austin and Oak Park.
The session, organized by the Oak Park Regional Housing Center and Communities First Association, turned out a crowd that was diverse, not only in race but in geography, with one-third or more of those gathered coming from Austin. Outside of a holiday party hosted in that same room each December by the Austin Weekly News and Wednesday Journal, I don’t recall a crowd so large or so mixed with people from each side of Austin Boulevard.
Something is percolating here. And while most in the room could be identified as members of the choir, the conversations and connections between our two communities are growing again after 45 years of Oak Park’s fear and distancing. But to have an evening that focused more specifically on the possibility of fostering racial integration in Austin is a critical and difficult extension of the conversation.
Rob Breymaier, executive director of the housing center and newly elected to the District 97 school board, quoted Dr. Martin Luther King who said residential segregation ties to all forms of segregation.
That was true in all-white Oak Park through the 1960s. And, in curious ways, it is true today in an 85 percent African-American Austin. Segregation is both a box and a protection.
Reesheda Washington, of Communities First and an owner of the new Live Café on Oak Park Avenue, was born and raised in Austin. She turned fast, in her opening comments, to the “big word in the room: Gentrification.”
From Wicker Park to Logan Square, now in Humboldt Park and even in East Garfield Park, market forces are at work in a stronger economy to turn lower-income minority communities into the next gentrified community for people of greater means, mostly white, who want the historic homes, want the proximity to the Loop, can afford to buy their way out of the public schools and who claim the mantle of urban pioneers as longtime black or Hispanic neighbors are displaced.
As so many interesting and energetic connections are being intentionally built in recent years between our communities — ministers, chambers, nonprofits — what is seldom spoken is the justified fear and suspicion in Austin over possible gentrification.
After 30 years publishing the Austin Weekly, I still hear our pretty strong efforts referred to occasionally as “the white paper from the suburbs.” More recently, there have been suggestions that our paper’s goal is to “colonize” Austin.
Gentrification “is constantly on people’s minds in Austin,” said Breymaier in a subsequent interview. And why not? He points out the similarities between Oak Park and Austin, typically overlooked in our stereotypical, haze-of-violence assessment of the neighborhood. Historic and diverse housing stock, from the gracious homes on Midway Park to the sturdy bungalows up north, loads of handsome, well-built two- and three-flats. Two el lines, the Ike, Metra. And dissimilar to Oak Park? Affordable.
In landlocked and hyper-taxed Oak Park, I’ve long wondered why has there been no notable gentrification pass coming out of this town. My conclusion is that our fears overwhelmed our housing lust.
Going forward, Washington urges a focus on building a Greater West Side that does not extinguish the individual and hard-fought identities of each community, that we move toward “an intentional integration focused on inclusion and equity.”
That’s progressive and hard and right.
Breymaier has watched neighborhoods gentrify and he says, “It is the kind of thing that can take over a neighborhood that doesn’t have a plan.” That sounds a lot like how Chicago neighborhoods got so rigidly segregated in the first place. The real estate market goes to work, greed and fear take hold, and voila: a new, changed neighborhood. No matter which direction all this is going — toward resegregation or gentrification — minorities lose out.
So Breymaier talks about “revitalization without displacement,” about an Austin “in charge of its destiny,” about building a wider “community to be strong on its own.”
Complex topics seldom discussed openly or honestly. But as Washington told reporter Xueer Zhang from our partner at Austin Talks, “We are having more candid conversations about the difficult topics that are a part of this world moving forward. So we’ve moved past the polite phase. And the work continues.”
