A Lesson in Economics

Even among white families eager to give lip service to racial equality, the prospect of having a Negro move into the house next door will often bring qualms about declining property values and a panicky urge to sell out fast. Last week one group of Philadelphia families fought back in a novel way against sellout fever.

Early last year a few Negroes began to move into an all-white section of Philadelphia's East Germantown. A number of other houses in the district promptly went up for sale. Real-estate brokers--many of them Negroes--moved en masse into the general area, asking white families to list their homes. When some white families refused to give listings, the brokers couldn't believe that they wanted to stay where they were.

Finally, eight white and four Negro families got together and started distributing signs to their neighbors, stating: THIS HOUSE IS NOT FOR SALE. Attached to the sign was a letter: "We like this neighborhood . . . Constant pressure from real-estate brokers is annoying and we resent it ... We have found that some white families are still under the mistaken impression that a community or block must remain all white or 'go all colored' [and] that property values decline when colored families move in ... Values do not decline except during panic selling."

Few of the 400-odd signs distributed in the neighborhood were posted. But leaders of the sign project were undismayed, felt it was too early to assess the impact their idea. In the meantime, their experiment could stand by itself as a primer lesson in both democracy and economics.

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