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The very high cost of housing, not burning crosses, is what keeps most blacks, and whites for that matter, out of North Shore suburbs. According to the 1990 Census, the average home value for Wilmette’s 8,350 houses was $314,000. That same year, only 728 black households in the entire eight-county area lived in a house valued over $300,000. Thus, most of the area’s affluent blacks would have to move to Wilmette to fill Massey’s 20 percent black quota.
In a hypothetical color-blind housing market, a random redistribution of blacks in the eight-county area, adjusting only for black housing budgets and local home prices and rents, would place enough blacks to make up 3.4 percent, instead of an actual 0.5 percent of Wilmette’s population. Thus, the high cost of its housing explains about 85 percent of black underrepresentation in Wilmette (the actual 0.5 percent versus Massey’s expected 20 percent).
For the last 25 years, most kinds of provable housing bias by public and private parties are prohibited by the Equal Protection Clause, the Brown, Shannon, Otero, and Geautraux decisions of the Supreme Court, and by the Fair Housing Act of 1968. Courts have not always vigorously enforced these laws partly because the great majority of whites and blacks apparently prefer to live apart, and their leaders know it.
