Blacks See Bias in a Pricier Neighborhood

Buyers, Researchers Allege Housing Discrimination in the Outer Suburbs

Jerry Cromwell found it strange that he and his wife were forced to wait an hour for a sales agent to show them through a stately suburban house in a posh new Anne Arundel County subdivision.

When the agent finally did acknowledge her black customers, her first question seemed even stranger. As Cromwell recalls, "She looked up at us from her desk and said, 'Are you sure you can afford a house in this community?' "

"I mean, I'm a salesman myself," said Cromwell, 45, who manages an Oxon Hill car dealership, "and this is not how you go about selling a house."

Cromwell later learned that a black colleague had a similar experience trying to buy one of the $500,000 homes in the same Davidsonville development. Last week, the two sued the builder, Winchester Homes, in federal court alleging fair-housing violations.

The Greenbelt company has denied the allegation. But the dispute helps confirm what many area academics and public officials predicted would happen as more middle- and upper-class black families migrated deeper into Washington's suburbs: They would often feel they had encountered a frosty reception.

"There is a growing perception in the white community that this problem has been solved," said Gregory Squires, a sociology professor at George Washington University. "But almost every indicator contradicts that."

Overt examples of race-based housing discrimination may be infrequent, but subtle steering remains an intractable problem, according to Squires's research. His study of the Washington suburbs, completed in July, found numerous episodes of discriminatory treatment in McLean, Alexandria, Arlington and in Silver Spring, where an agent told one black researcher, posing as a home buyer, that he'd be better off "looking in Prince George's County."

Of 921 Washington area residents surveyed for Squires's study, 33 percent of blacks said they were unable to move into their first choice of housing, as compared to 20 percent of their white counterparts.

Concern that minorities might be facing discrimination in Loudoun County has prompted housing officials there to seek a state grant to send undercover "testers" to houses and apartments listed on the real estate market to gauge the severity of the problem.

"I have suspicions but no hard data," said Cindy Mester, director of the county's housing services office. "As the demographics of our county change and our population grows, I want to make sure it doesn't become a problem."

Census figures show a steady increase in well-off black families moving to the Washington region's outermost counties. In such Anne Arundel suburbs as Crofton, Riva and Shadyside -- once predominantly white farming and bedroom communities -- those numbers have increased dramatically. And the increase has coincided with mounting evidence of racial tension.

In 1999, county officials tussled with a still-active chapter of the Ku Klux Klan over whether it could participate in a road cleanup program that would place its name on an adopt-a-road street sign. The county canceled the program.

In March 2000, when the black Anne Arundel school superintendent suggested busing students from an all-white elementary school to temporary quarters next to the majority-black Annapolis Middle School, she received a racially tinged death threat. That June, an arsonist struck the county NAACP chapter's headquarters.

This summer has seen three cases of racist vandalism in Arundel, including one Aug. 24 that left "KKK" smeared on a house in the mostly white suburb of Woodland Beach -- a house that was about to be bought by a black family.