Having examined in part two of “It Pays to Stay When Blacks Move In” (MONEY magazine, November 1973) some of the varying powerful forces (real estate agents, mortgage lenders, and the Federal Government itself) which have helped keep the myth about the inevitability of decline of property values alive and well, we now take a look at some healthy, stabilized, integrated communities:

Harmony in Shaker Heights

Anyone seeking horror stories to support the view that a declining neighborhood is the price of integration must look somewhere other than Shaker Heights. The first-time visitor to this Cleveland suburb is left with a lingering impression of neatness: carefully groomed lawns, streets lined with stately old shade trees, trim, kept-up houses.

In the 1970 census, this city of 36,306 was found to be 14 ½ percent black, and the percentage may be two or three points higher now. The median family income stood at nearly $20,000. More than half of the men and almost one-third of the women older than 25 were college graduates. The census also counted 88 percent of the houses in Shaker Heights as worth more than $25,000, with the median value $41,600.

Shaker Heights residents think of their city as divided into nine area, each served by different elementary school. The farther from the Cleveland city line, the larger and more expensive the houses become and the whiter the neighborhoods, though every section of town has Black homeowners. The Ludlow, Moreland, Lomaond and Sussex areas are substantially integrated. Blacks range from about 15 percent in Sussex to 60 percent in Moreland. Most houses sell for $25,000 to $40,000. Houses and estates in the city’s highest-priced sections sell for $80,000 to $500,000.

The integration of Shaker Heights began about a decade ago. In the mid-1960s, when blacks began spilling across the Cleveland line into Ludlow and Moreland, some whites panicked and sold out cheaply. But in the past five or six years panic has ebbed. White families now routinely buy houses in every part of Shaker Heights except Moreland, where the change in attitude may have come too late.

“People who run because they’re afraid they’ll lose the money they’ve got in their house are sabotaging their community,” Roger D. Ritley, a real estate appraiser who lives in Sussex, says angrily. “More than that, they’re sabotaging this society by creating enclaves of racism.” Ritley, 32, this year published an analysis of property value trends in Lomond and Sussex, covering every house that had changed hands twice between January 1968 and December 1971. Far from decreasing, Ritley discovered, values gained an average of 8.8 percent in Lomond, which has a higher percentage of blacks than Sussex. Increased by 5.1 percent. In Rocky River, a closely comparable but all white community on Cleveland west side, values rose by 10.9 percent over the same period. Since 1971, Ritley believes, the price trends in the two Shaker heights sections and Rocky River have become almost indistinguishable. Nationally, used houses appreciated by 31 percent between 1968 and 1972.