The first house in Chicago was a rude cabin built by a Negro in 1790. There were several Negro home owners when the city was incorporated in 1837. The first Negroes to settle near Thirtieth Street—long before the city had extended its limits that far—owned their homes. Although prior to 1916 most Negroes did not own homes, there were many, especially business and professional men, who had gradually acquired dwellings. The migration brought thousands of Negroes with ready cash who found it easy to buy dwellings on the South Side. The uncomfortable and inadequate dwellings of the "Black Belt" could be avoided only by the purchase of property elsewhere. Attention thus was directed, probably for the first time, to the question of home buying by Negroes. Indeed home owning is an essential feature of any solution of their housing difficulties.
Until the migration Chicago's Negroes had engaged chiefly in personal-service occupations that governed somewhat the location of their homes; when these were not in the "Black Belt" they were in shabby property in undesirable streets near their employment. Men who worked on dining- and sleeping-cars lived near the railroad stations—on State and Dearborn streets, Plymouth Place, and the surrounding neighborhood; they were generally renters and moved southward with the general trend.
Home buying stimulated by high wages and the migration.—The war brought wages to the Negroes that seemed fabulous to many; and the wages brought the migration. The first migrants were mostly drifters. Then came a great many who had acquired considerable substance in the South, and having sold out they came to Chicago with ready money, in some instances large amounts. This class of Negroes bought dwellings. Several of them bought apartment buildings, said a real estate dealer, and in one instance the buyer paid $10,000 in cash; and there were very many who were able and ready to pay from $1,000 to $3,000 on the purchase of a residence in a respectable neighborhood. Another dealer said that he was not able to supply the buying demand: "We have put renters on the side list; buyers are taking up the time. We used to think $500 a good-sized payment for them, but now they often have $3,000, $4,000, or $6,000. A Negro customer lately wanted a twelve-flat building and would pay cash."
"The average newcomer is a home-owner," said another realty dealer; "he has sold his home in the South to come here. Some say the high wages are not attracting them so much as better schools."
Another dealer said that the average amount per family brought from the South was from $300 to $500, and he knew of one family that brought $6,000.
It was the experience of another firm that three or four years ago Negro purchasers paid down about $500, but that now (1920) they frequently make first payments of $1,000 or more.
This sudden wave of home buying impressed Carl Sandburg, who wrote (1919) in the Chicago Daily News:
Twenty years ago fewer than fifty families of the colored race were home owners in Chicago. Today they number thousands, their purchases ranging from $200 to $20,000, from tar paper shacks in the still district to brownstone and greystone establishments with wealthy or well-to-do white neighbors. In most cases, where a colored man has investments of more than ordinary size, it is in large part in real estate. Realty investment and management seems to be an important field of operation among those colored people who acquire substance.
Several other factors contributed to this house-buying movement. One was that Hyde Park had many available houses in the early years of the war, while the Negro was excluded from the market west of Wentworth Avenue, with its smaller and less expensive houses, by the vigorous antagonism of the Irish and other people living there. The southern Negroes were glad to find that—at first, anyway—access was not denied them to districts having good schools, churches, recreation and amusements, and convenient transportation facilities. This feeling was reflected in their purchase of churches; two of these, one on Washington Boulevard and one on Prairie Avenue, are in districts of extensive home buying by Negroes.
The high war wages contributed to home buying. Though in many instances they induced extravagant expenditures, a surplus remained for many, and with the frugal the savings were large.