Author’s Note

Though the characters and events of this book are entirely fictional, the Oak Park Community Housing Office is inspired by the real-life Oak Park Regional Housing Center. Oak Park’s Diversity Assurance program is similarly based on an actual program in the Village (one of many throughout the years). I have collapsed several different programs under the umbrella of Diversity Assurance here for the sake of narrative clarity. Oak Park itself has been the study of demographers worldwide for many years. In the years it took to write this book, I read blogs, letters, Listservs, and community articles that discussed the diversity programs, and the area’s longtime integration efforts, with more detail than any casual reader is likely interested in. But those sites showed me that while the methodology might not be agreed upon, the heart and soul of the real Oak Park community shares a deep and abiding commitment to inclusion.

My interest was more than academic, however. I first moved to Oak Park in 1992, right out of college, into a building on Austin Boulevard owned by Russell and Kevin Schuman, who had a company called RK Management. They believed in the mission of integration, and still do today, and I am profoundly grateful to have crossed paths with them. They owned several large buildings on Oak Park’s east side, and had hired a resident manager for each. The woman who managed my building—Ann Maxwell—was also fresh out of college. Ann was the first community activist I’d ever met, the first person to show me that a neighborhood with diverse faces and voices and viewpoints offered a much richer experience, a better world, than one of homogeneity. In the early nineties, Ann used to hold potluck dinners for the tenants of the building so we’d get to know one another. She started what was then a radical program: having renters in a multi-unit building recycle their waste. She swept the alleyways and picked up trash and calmed tenants during stressful times. Once, when the power went out during a storm, she invited all the neighbors she could find to play cards by candlelight in her apartment. It is hard to capture all that she has added to my life over the past two decades. She is my soul sister, my closest confidant, and the person I most aspire to be like: humble, curious, brilliant, empathic, steadfast, and hilarious.

Eventually, I became a resident manager myself for RK Manage­ment, at a building three blocks west of Austin Boulevard, and just around the corner from Ann. On paper, my job was to clean the building, show apartments, and be a point of contact for complaints or issues. But my real job was to create community. We managers were the most visible and present manifestation of a belief system that said all people had a right to live where they choose, free from crime and racial intolerance. We tried to make neighbors known to neighbors, to foster friendships and relationships—things that often prove challenging among renters. Everything one could imagine happened during my five years in that job: fires, floods, break-ins, drug dealing, domestic violence. One girl who’d gotten addicted to crack was wheeled out of the building on a gurney multiple times; she was fifteen years old. When she eventually moved, we found locking mechanisms outside her bedroom—the sign of a mother perhaps in equal measures abusive and terrified. Another woman was regularly beaten by her boyfriend, but refused to cooperate with police when they were called to the scene—an act I only later discovered was likely her means of self-protection when the officers left. Those were some of the worst moments. We had many, many beautiful ones, too. One tenant taught his neighbors how to dance. Another group began an annual camping trip together. We planted a collective herb and vegetable garden, and held building-wide courtyard parties and potlucks. Of the many, many lessons I garnered while in that job, perhaps none has been more profound than the realization that if you come from the majority culture you have the luxury of racial oblivion, by which I mean you need not think that race is part of everything; minorities very often do not know such luxury. It is a lesson I try to impart on my daughter. Though she is only five, when I walk into a classroom—my own or hers—or an event or a party, I find myself instantly scanning the faces for diversity—in race, in culture, in gender. Too often, I am disappointed by what I see.

Though the mission of the Housing Center is controversial to some, at its core it was begun by a group of idealistic people who believed integration was a primary marker of both social progress and a rich and varied life, and who fervently espoused the view that decent housing in a safe community with a good school district was a basic human right. Even in the late sixties in Oak Park, it was entirely legal for Realtors to refuse to show properties to minority families. Roberta “Bobbie” Raymond began the Housing Center out of a church classroom, with the aim of correcting some of the grave injustices committed under the discriminatory practices of redlining and blockbusting—practices rampant in Chicago and many other cities across the U.S. in the early part of the twentieth century. Recently, she completed a DVD for the Oak Park Library’s historical archives about what it was like to start the Center forty years ago. She and her colleagues received death threats at the time. But the question, she said in the interview, is the same today as it was four decades earlier: “How much do you intervene? . . . You wish that it all were not necessary.”

Indeed.

But as a writer and a humanist, I am grateful for the legacy—and the challenge to do better—that she and so many others have left me.