(gentle music) - It is a beautiful day, sunny but cool.

(car door closing) (gentle music) Park Ridge is a little bit famous because first of all, Hillary Clinton grew up here, also Harrison Ford.

So one thing I like about this town and you like too, right?

- Yeah.

- It feels like a little town, not right next to Chicago.

But we have the advantage of being in the big city with all that it offers.

Park Ridge is traditionally a conservative community.

This is a bedroom community where people live here and work somewhere else.

And I remember the Chris bought a business in town and I came and drove around and I remember thinking this is a place where I could feel comfortable.

And now I realize as I look back on that, that one reason I felt that way is because everybody I saw was white.

And that was what I was used to.

(car engine rumbling) I think we chose Park Ridge because we felt like we would fit in.

(dogs barking) Park Ridge is 95, about, percent white.

Hi.

Over time I've come to realize that the things that were attractive to me about park Ridge are also things that are difficult about park Ridge.

It's very expensive now.

So that house over there is the one they didn't tear down.

And it's really, really old at Central Park.

We have tear down houses down here where they built big houses on the lots.

So we're getting this homogenous group of very well-heeled young people and the people who are not so well-healed are shut out.

And I think it's not healthy.

Oh, here's our family, here we all are.

Mark and Megan and Kim and Donna.

And there's when started judo, see he's just a yellow belt, that's the beginning.

We adopted a boy, mixed race, as he was growing up in park Ridge, I was more aware of what he experienced and that sort of raised my consciousness too.

I did know that this would be a hard community possibly for Mark to grow up in.

And we made a decision to stay here because Chris had a business right here.

We have struggled with our decision not to move to a more diverse community.

The white population lives around central part of park Ridge and the Southern part of park Ridge.

And the kids all go to Maine South High School.

The people of color for the part live in the north side and kids go to Maine East, and Maine East is 90% kids of color.

We decided to send our son Mark here because he thought this would be a better school for him because Maine East does have a more diverse population.

Here he would be part of the majority.

Maine East is very diverse, partly because this part of Park Ridge right here has housing that's less expensive than area around Maine South.

There's a segregation here in this area to a great extent because of systemic racism that's happened over generations in this part of the suburbs of Chicago.

So we're gonna have some lunch.

We have lots of strange leftovers in the refrigerator though.

Chris is a carnivore, I'm a vegetarian.

Segregation is a social construct, people live in their, own little bubble and that there's not that richness of diversity of culture that I think is much healthier.

We're each going to have some carrot souffle, right?

- Yeah.

- I think segregation creates weakness.

I can understand why and because I'm part of it, we do it because we feel more comfortable.

A lot of people wanna live that way.

They don't wanna have to deal with conflict or what integration might bring for them.

And so they choose the easy path.

And I think that's one thing that motivates me in a way I think they need me here.

- And if the the policies are changed to make it more welcoming 'cause people of color need to want to move here.

Has to be some reason for them to move here.

- Yeah, same reason anybody wants to move here.

- Right.

- Good schools, great transportation.

- Yeah.

Still struggle with concrete actions that I can take, but I'm working on that.

- We can affect change here maybe.

- We'll see.

- A little bit.

(gentle music) Let's see if you like this, she's a very picky eater, you know?

Here you go.

What do you think of this?

It's like good?

Ye eh.

I always have looked for ways to make change, especially community organizing and so on.

So I'm going to pick the best ones to give away and keep the weird ones.

Over 10 years ago, I heard about this interfaith housing group that was working on increasing affordable housing in Northwestern suburbs.

See the contrast between the red carrot and the white carrot.

We have diversified carrots, ain't that cool?

I began studying the issue and then eventually I formed Action Ridge, which is a social justice group here in park Ridge.

- Hello my dear.

- Hi darling.

- The racial makeup of Action Ridge is predominantly white because we're all white here and it's mostly women.

Action Ridge has tried to include people of color, but it's been hard.

I think, you know, we don't know very many for one thing and the couple of times we've tried, people of color have not wanted to be part of Action Ridge.

We often, we're talking about things that we don't really know about.

We're just talking in theory and don't have the experience.

But there's also the issue, which I can understand, why should people of color try to teach us white folks?

Okay, all right, I wanna welcome you all to the Action Ridge tonight.

I'm so glad you could come.

And we predict rightly that this will be a very interesting evening on the subject of affordable housing and segregation, particularly focusing on Park Ridge and park Ridge environs.

And our first speaker is Ann Kapustiak who is a recent graduate from Tulane University where she did research on affordable housing, take it away.

- This is a really important topic obviously to be discussing and you know, I'm presenting evidence about what has occurred but you know, the whole reason we're all here is to talk about what can be done moving forward in the future.

So this is just to provide a little context for why Park Ridge is not the most diverse place.

- Having lived here for 50 years, 55 years.

It's sort of struck me that we were segregated.

I mean, it's so silly.

We know it, we see it all the time, many of us are sort of denied I think, what we could see before us.

More and more we're realizing this was done on purpose.

- This isn't an example of a red lining map.

You can see that the red area is further into the inner city.

Those are populations that either have very high poverty or very high populations of races that were considered like not desirable at the time.

Our grid does technically have some of those yellow areas, but the reasoning in the report for why it was marked that is to do with the physical value of the properties, the houses in that area were not as nice anymore and it was a little bit rundown.

Whereas if you look at Humble Park which is in that red area, that received a negative red marking because of quote, "Negro Infiltration."

So there's like a very clear bias here in the way that the government is suggesting where to spend money.

And it's 100% correlated with race.

Park Ridge, like a lot of municipalities in the area actually allowed racial covenants, meaning-- - There were two communities in Park Ridge where there were covenants, which read clearly you may not buy or rent in this area unless you're Caucasian.

And then over time, you know, it just snowballed or sort of continued that once people felt excluded, people of color didn't try to live in this part of Park Ridge.

Our next speaker is Michael Rabbit, who is co-founder of Neighbors for Affordable Housing and has been a long time advocate for affordable housing.

- Thanks, Nan.

And I just want to start by-- - I'm working to increase affordable housing in Park Ridge because it's one way to make our town a little bit more diverse.

- I heard about a proposal to bring affordable housing to the far Northwest side.

Now that was like a really big deal because there is no real affordable housing in this area.

We do really want to drum up as much support as possible.

This is an important issue for park Ridge.

These opportunities do not come up very often because of people like Alderman who are part of these forces that just seek to constantly maintain segregation.

- The reason why we've become so active currently is that Park Ridge is in the process of rewriting their comprehensive plan.

And so we have a chance, an opening to put in a housing plan that looks to the future and takes into account this need for more diversified housing stock.

The Planning and Zoning Commission however, under the leadership of their chair wanted to take those provisions out of the comprehensive plan.

And when that happened, the comprehensive plan got put on hold.

People are afraid that affordable housing would be bad people.

This is indeed a myth that property values do not go down.

You know, crime does not go up and so on.

Other communities that are doing this have not suffered because of it.

All right, all right, all right already.

The ideal situation is that the population be dispersed.

You know, that there be integration.

Can you helped me?

Because I think people can understand each other better, can learn about each other, can feel comfortable together.

That makes it possible to work together, to make change and to have creative ideas and a culture that's rich.

You know, we've got such a terrible problem with violence and people hating each other.

That if you don't know each other, if you're not around each other, those kinds of things can take hold.

I mean, the reason people are so paranoid is because they don't know each other.

I hope that we can look at the history of our community and make changes.

Anything we can do to make it easier for somebody else is what we should do.

(gentle music playing)