Illinois town starts spending to address the racial divide

The writer is an FT contributing columnist

I live on one side of the railway tracks in a small town outside Chicago, and most of the city’s black residents live on the other side. In US census tract 8092, on the mostly African-American side of Evanston, Illinois, the average life expectancy at birth is 75.5 years.

In census tract 8094, on the mostly white side of this town of 73,000 (16 per cent of whom are black), life expectancy at birth is 86 years. That is today’s America in a snapshot: a land where the colour of one’s skin can still mean the difference between life and death.

That truism was made vivid last week as US television broadcast live the trial of a white policeman accused of murdering George Floyd, a black man whose death last May set off the biggest US anti-racism protests in more than 50 years. 

But it’s not just traumatic police body-camera footage that brings this fact of life home to those of us who live in the racially divided cities of the American Midwest. My morning walk traverses the big divide, from the land of the 86-year life expectancy to the land of the 75-year life expectancy, and it doesn’t take a genius to tell which is which. The houses on one side are many times bigger, nicer and newer than those on the other.

Evanston is hardly alone in this: according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis black families owned 3 per cent of total US household wealth in 2019, despite making up 15 per cent of households, while white families owned 85 per cent of wealth but made up two-thirds of households.

So when Evanston decided in 2019 to become the first city to establish a $10m reparations fund for African-American residents, it is scarcely surprising that they focused on housing. 

Last month, Evanston city council voted eight to one to spend the first $400,000 of the fund, which is financed by the town’s share of Illinois recreational marijuana tax revenues, on a “restorative housing programme”. The fund will provide up to $25,000 as a down payment on a house, for home renovations or for mortgage relief, enough to help just 16 families. Those eligible must have lived in Evanston between 1919 and 1969 or be a direct descendant of an individual harmed by discriminatory housing policies known as “redlining”. Neighbourhoods that were seen as deteriorating or “hazardous” were marked in red on realtors’ maps, and those were often majority black or mixed areas.

Evanston mayor-elect Daniel Biss says he thinks the decision to stick to a housing-focused programme (rather than the direct cash payments favoured by Alderwoman Cicely Fleming, the sole dissenting vote) was probably influenced by a letter the city received challenging the legality of reparations.

Focusing on housing, an area where the city can point to a clear history of racial discrimination, will make the programme more likely to survive the inevitable constitutional challenges, says Alvin Tillery, director of the Center for the Study of Diversity and Democracy at Northwestern University, also in Evanston. 

“Given the conservative jurisprudence around racial equity in America, governments are really constrained in terms of what they can do. Programmes have to be ‘narrowly tailored’ to meet the specific harm and in this case that harm is redlining,” he told the Financial Times in an interview.

A report by city historians outlines Evanston’s history of housing discrimination: in 1940 most of the city’s black residents were confined to today’s census tract 8092, the place where life still lasts a decade less. 

Tina Paden, 50, lives in the house her African-American ancestors built in Evanston in the late 1880s. She told the FT that cash payments should go to seniors who were at least alive during the redlining period. But most of them won’t qualify under the plan says Paden, a realtor, because older black Evanstonians who are now renting will not be likely to buy a home so late in life, and those who own homes cannot benefit.

Biss says: “If it works, in terms of measurably reducing the gap, that will be the most compelling argument of all”. Perhaps this tale of two tracts will be told differently the next time a census is taken, in 2030. But if history is any guide, that may be too much to hope for.