‘Like a test run for the whole country’: Blue city pours $10 million into reparations

Evanston, Illinois, is paying out $10 million over the course of a decade to black residents as part of a reparations program for past housing discrimination, as well as their descendants, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The program is granting $25,000 each to 140 elderly residents this year, and those recipients’ 500 descendants will also eventually receive reparations, according to the WSJ. Initial recipients had to have been at least 18 and living in Evanston between 1919 and 1969, during which time housing discrimination and red-lining impeded black residents from purchasing homes in certain areas.

“Our job here is just to move forward and to continue being that example, to continue illustrating that a small municipality can make real tangible progress,” Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss said, according to the outlet.

The payments were initially meant to come only as vouchers toward mortgage debt, down payments and home renovations, but have since been adjusted to allow for cash in some cases, since not all recipients own or intend to buy a home, according to the WSJ. The program was originally to be funded by marijuana taxes, but that funding came in too slowly, so the city is now using funds from a real-estate transfer tax on higher-value properties.

While dozens of American cities have proposed racial reparations payments in recent years, Evanston is the first municipality to follow through on the payments, according to the WSJ.

“I see it as like a test run for the whole country,” Justin Hansford, head of the Thurgood Marshall Civil Rights Center at Howard University, told the WSJ.

California’s Reparations Task Force submitted recommendations to the state legislature last month recommending, among other things, cash payments of over $1 million to eligible black Californians.

The Evanston resolution on reparations first passed in 2019.

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