DATE: Thursday, July 10, 1997               TAG: 9707100005

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B9   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: OPINION 

SOURCE: Patrick Lackey

                                            LENGTH:   82 lines

RACE HAMPTON ROADS SUBURBS ARE MORE INTEGRATED THAN INNER CITIES

An Alabama principal threatens to cancel the prom if interracial couples attend. He's promoted to superintendent.

First-year black enrollment at leading law schools in Texas and California plummets almost out of sight, immediately after affirmative action programs end.

Many Hampton Roads inner-city schools have returned to an overwhelmingly black enrollment.

News of race relations in America is mixed. But often you have to search for the good news, while the bad news hits you in the face.

When I feel a need for good news, I sometimes recall an article, now four years old, that then-staff writer Alex Marshall wrote about racial integration in booming Hampton Roads suburbs.

The article began:

``There are 14 homes on Rip Rap Court (in Virginia Beach). White families live in eight. Black families life in four, a Filipino family in one, and a Native American family in another. Nine families have at least one member in the military.

``Racially, Rip Rap looks like the rest of Rock Creek, which looks like many new subdivisions spread across southern Virginia Beach and into Chesapeake.''

I still remember reading that and thinking, ``That sounds a whole lot like my two-block-long neighborhood.''

Marshall's analysis of 1990 Census data at the block-by-block level showed Hampton Roads suburbs had integrated faster than most of the country.

The large military presence here was the main reason. The military, swollen by Reagan's 1980s defense buildup, provided middle-class incomes for thousands of blacks in Hampton Roads.

Money is all anyone needs to get into a new subdivision. Although bigots in established neighborhoods may find ways to work around federal housing laws prohibiting racial discrimination, those laws are difficult to evade when a 200-acre subdivision springs overnight from a field. Developers or Realtors can hardly tell a black couple that no homes are available there.

Once largely barred from suburbia, blacks have sought admission with the same eagerness that other once-barred ethnic groups showed earlier, such as Jews, Poles and Italians. ``As the black middle class developed,'' Marshall wrote, ``its members sought the same two-story home with the big yard and found it in the just-built subdivision on the edge of town.''

The result in Hampton Roads is that Virginia Beach and Chesapeake neighborhoods have become more integrated than Portsmouth and Norfolk neighborhoods, which tend more to be white or black.

New Hampton Roads neighborhoods have meant a fresh start for race relations. ``A new subdivision hasn't had a history of one group claiming it as their turf,'' said George C. Galster, senior research associate at the Urban Institute in Washington. ``There is not the opposition to change that arises in older inner-city neighborhoods.''

Also, ironically enough, a subdivision's lack of demographic diversity can contribute to racial harmony. As Marshall wrote, ``If your neighbor is the same age, with kids around the same age and a similar income, you may have a lot in common even if your skin color differs.''

One submarine mechanic living on a Virginia Beach cul-de-sac told Marshall that of the nine families there, three were black and one was Hispanic. Seven of the nine were military. ``In fact,'' the mechanic said, ``you have the same mixture out in the housing developments that you do on the ship.''

In suburbia, trouble comes to a neighborhood not so much when the racial mix changes as when poorer people, white or black, move in, usually as renters.

For some reason, presumably racism, it is easier for poor whites and poor Hispanics to spread out beyond the inner city than for poor blacks to do the same. Studies in Washington, D.C., and Baltimore showed far greater dispersion of poor whites and poor Hispanics than of poor blacks.

Thus poor blacks are less likely to live near jobs than are poor whites and poor Hispanics. That does not bode well for blacks seeking work to get off welfare, not where mass transit is inadequate.

But getting back to the good news, countless Hampton Roads neighborhoods are happily integrated, including mine. Living in an all-white neighborhood would feel odd, after 13 years in the present one.

Our nation tried to solve its racial problems by busing white and black children to the same schools. A better idea is for families of all races to be neighbors. Why not in the suburbs? It's the American dream. MEMO: Mr. Lackey is an editorial writer for The Virginian-Pilot.

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