Ernest Hemingway once described his home town of Oak Park, Illinois, as “a village of broad lawns and narrow minds.” But modern Oak Park is trying to reverse Hemingway’s adjectives with a valiant attempt at broad-mindedness. The woodsy Chicago suburb recently devised a cash merit system to reward citizens who choose against segregation.
It works like this: If you own an apartment building occupied by members of one race only, you can earn a $1,000 bonus by letting the village help you decide on your renters for the next five years. They will seek out minority families to move into all-white housing, and white families to move into all-black housing. The planners hope that landlords will want to integrate their properties as it suddenly becomes profitable.
The new law reminds me of a fair housing proposal described in Harper’s magazine over a decade ago. “Let’s face it,” began the author, “appeals to morality and high ideals never convince Americans to change their views and behavior patterns. The only way to produce change is to make it financially worth our while. Then you’ll see some action.”
The author went on to present a national program far more sweeping than Oak Park’s. What would happen, he asked with tongue not quite in cheek, if Congress passed a law granting a $4,000 annual tax deduction to any family who lived next door to a member of a minority race? (The treasury could actually save money by slashing far less effective fair-housing programs.) Overnight, the free market would work miracles of racial reconciliation.
Property values would rise, not fall, when a community integrated, and minority races would thus become the most sought-after residents. Advertisements like this would appear in local papers:
“$1,500 cash to any black or Hispanic family willing to move to the 700 block of Conwell Street! Will pay all moving expenses. Free prizes from local merchants!”
The cash-for-morality approach, first suggested whimsically in a magazine article and now openly legislated in Oak Park, offers a quintessentially American solution to a social problem. It combines naïve ingenuity with the old-fashioned profit motive. Will the most hardened bigot be able to resist a lucrative cash incentive?
Oak Park made the local news again not long ago when former President Jimmy Carter made a fund-raising appearance there on behalf of a Christian organization called Habitat for Humanity. A few months later he returned to Chicago wearing blue jeans and a work shirt: Carter was once again contributing his carpentry skills to help rebuild dilapidated inner-city houses. News cameramen could not seem to get enough footage of the former world leader wielding a hammer in the slums of Chicago.
Habitat for Humanity offers a different approach to social problems than that under experiment in Oak Park. The organization operates not in affluent suburbs but in squalid patches of aging cities where no one wants to live. People don’t receive cash bonuses; rather, volunteers like Jimmy Carter work long hours without pay.
The poverty families selected to live in the rehabbed houses work alongside these volunteers, building up “sweat equity” and learning how to make basic home repairs. No one realizes any investment gain or tax savings; Habitat grants no-interest loans to the new owners.
Local organizations manage the properties. In places like Chicago, they attempt to resettle the communities around the rehabbed houses. Committed Christian couples, mostly from middle-class backgrounds, move into the neighborhood, offering role models for the poor and bringing a social stability to the area.
Two approaches to the same problem got me thinking about the whole issue of social change. Both the Oak Park City Council and Habitat for Humanity share common goals: good, reasonable housing for the poor, and some way to break through the discrimination deadlock. But their techniques for reaching those goals differ greatly.
Oak Park hopes to “fix” its society with a carefully controlled plan to change the environments, and, ultimately, the value systems of various minority groups. To accomplish that goal, they rely on a powerful motivator: human greed. Their plan is creative and rational—an example of the kingdom of this world at its best.
Habitat for Humanity, in contrast, is working to produce a far more radical change among a smaller group of people. They desire to change not only the human environment, but the human heart. They believe it is not enough for people with resources to invite in well-screened representatives of minority groups.
Rather, people of resources must go, voluntarily, to the places of need, and give their time, and their sweat, and their families, and their love. Even greed is not a strong enough motivator to accomplish that sacrifice. It requires instead the Christian commitment of people willing to take a risk with no prospect of reward in this life—in other words, the kingdom that is not of this world.
Within a few months’ time, Chicagoans saw two different news clips of Jimmy Carter: the distinguished former President speaking at a dress-up affair in Oak Park and then the same man swinging a hammer on the west side of Chicago. Mr. Carter has had his feet in both kingdoms. A few years ago he could have ordered up housing for thousands with a stroke of his pen. Now he helps out the poor like anyone else: in person, one nail at a time.
As I watched the ironic juxtaposition of the news reports of Carter’s visits, I could not help wondering which approach gave him most personal satisfaction. One thing troubled me, though: Why is it that when a former President comes to town to build houses for the poor, hundreds of people will pay $50 to dress up and hear him talk about it, but only a handful will take their hammers and join him?
