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The neighborhood is a reminder that homeownership for blacks, once rare, became a reality for many, said Ruth D'hondt, who has lived there since 1959. Just a few years earlier, city developers were advertising homes in "whites only" subdivisions.

"It just grieves me we would walk away from something that was so hard fought for and was so valuable," said D'hondt, 65, a retired server at Caesars Palace.

The neighborhoods were developed as the G.I. Bill made homeownership a reality for millions for the first time, including blacks. Cities partnered with the government — the Veterans Administration or the Federal Housing Authority — and private developers with a conscience. 

Preservationists work for recognition of black suburbs
By Andrew Welsh-Huggins, Associated Press

COLUMBUS, Ohio — Young, working-class and black, Henry Bolden Jr. was not the kind of person who bought a new house in 1946, even in the North.

But Bolden was also a U.S. Army veteran who'd spent World War II driving supply trucks in Belgium and France. With help from the GI Bill, he was able to buy his house in a Columbus neighborhood that was revolutionary in its day: Hanford Village, an enclave of single-family homes marketed solely to blacks.

"I would have been stuck, like a lot of other people are still stuck, renting houses in the poor, rundown neighborhoods," said Bolden, who at 82 still lives in the same small house on the city's east side.

Some of the early black homeowner neighborhoods around the country are trying to win historic recognition before their place in the history of homeownership fades.

The residents want to be listed on the National Register of Historic Places, which would make them eligible for federal tax credits or grants for historic preservation. The designation doesn't protect against demolition but requires anyone involved with a federally funded project, including developers, to take the listing into consideration when the work could endanger the structure.