For Camille Baum, who is East Indian and whose husband is white, the racially diverse community of Beverly is the ideal place to live.
“I wanted to give the kids a chance to grow up in a community where people are not one way or another. Beverly is like that,” she said.
For Adrienne Allen, who describes herself as “mixed” black and white, Beverly is physically “gorgeous,” but its racial diversity makes it a less attractive place to live.
The reason? “I’m afraid it’s not going to stay integrated. I figure five years before it’s totally black, and then I’ll have to move.”
She worries about black teenagers she sees hanging around on street corners-“forgotten people,” she calls them. She sees other all-black neighborhoods where the residential areas are beautiful, but the big commercial streets have abandoned, derelict stores.
“It gives you nightmares that it’s going to happen here,” she said.
For Frank Sheridan, who is white, Beverly’s diversity in itself didn’t play a part in his decision when he and his wife and children moved there from the North Side. He wanted a good quality of life, but he didn’t want to move to the suburbs, which he described as “spread out and stale.”
But he was brought up in Beverly, and he did feel that his moving back there was “helping the stability of the community,” he said. “That’s an important value.”
The attitudes of these three Beverly residents, all of whom moved there within the last year or so, reflect the fact that people who relocate to “diverse” or integrated communities have diverse reasons for doing so and diverse feelings about diversity itself.
The Southwest Side’s rolling, lush Beverly neighborhood, which for most of this century was one of the most opulent and exclusive sections of the city, began to experience racial change in the early 1970s and responded, unlike many other areas undergoing change at the time, with a concerted effort to curtail white flight.
The Beverly Area Planning Association (BAPA), composed of civic and business groups supported by area churches and financial institutions, upped its budget, hired an aggressive community organizer and developed a series of initiatives to increase confidence in the area.
The programs involved keeping a close watch on real estate practices while promoting property upkeep, economic development and an enhanced community image. A telephone hotline was set up for rumor control.
The campaign unabashedly was aimed at preventing resegregation. The energetic man brought in as executive director, G. Phillip Dolan, was quoted as saying a “dramatic increase in the visibility of blacks” could torpedo the stabilization program.
More Top Picks Best Fish Tanks
The program, which BAPA continues with many of the same techniques today, has been a success, at least in its stated goals of avoiding resegregation, maintaining white housing demand and keeping up real estate values.
Beverly, which was 0.1 percent black in 1970, was 13.6 percent black in 1980 and 24 percent black in 1990. While that’s a doubling of the black population in a decade, it is a very moderate transition compared with that experienced by other communities, such as West Englewood and South Shore.
Undoubtedly, Beverly’s physical attractiveness and fine old houses, plus the comparatively high socioeconomic and education level of its residents, help keep white housing demand up.
BAPA, which keeps close tabs on people moving in, noted in its 1992 home buyers survey that 53 percent had annual family incomes over $60,000 and 70 percent had completed college, with half going on to graduate school. Seventy-one percent of the new residents were white, the survey said.
Veronica “Sis” Costello, BAPA’s current executive director, says people move to Beverly because they want an integrated community. “First-time buyers especially are choosing us for what we are,” she said. “They want to raise their kids in the real world.”
But the comments of the new movers themselves indicates the truth is somewhat less clear.
Camille Baum fits Costello’s description, and probably is Costello’s ideal resident, since she also is a strong believer in just the kind of community involvement that BAPA represents. “Everybody has to pull together to really make (integration) happen,” Baum said.
But she and her husband, a doctor working at the University of Chicago, may not be representative since they moved from Hyde Park, another integrated community. In fact, Baum said they would have stayed in Hyde Park if they could have afforded a home there.
Sheridan was insistent that the diversity had no effect on him one way or the other, though he said he was aware Beverly was integrated before moving in.
But he said he is a strong believer in community, and that Beverly offered more in terms of community life than suburbia, an option he considered. “In Beverly on a Saturday you can see 35 kids riding their bikes up and down the streets and people working on their houses,” he said.
Allen expressed doubt that Beverly, despite its diverse racial makeup, is more than superficially integrated. In her experience, she said, whites pretend blacks aren’t there and “work around them, so we really never have been integrated.”
She said she’d lived in Beverly a year after moving from San Diego, but still didn’t know whether blacks were accepted. A Chicago native who moved away 20 years ago, she was surprised-and very reassured-on being told that Beverly’s integration had been fairly stable over two decades.
“That makes me happy,” she said. “Maybe I can stay here longer.”