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Lined with trees and modest one-story homes, Lawrence Lane in Midtown Palo Alto may look like a typical 1950s neighborhood today, but when construction on the first homes began on Feb. 23, 1950, the subdivision made headlines.
The 6-acre, 25-home development was designed specifically as an experiment in interracial living — an idea considered radical at the time.
A radical vision takes shape
The idea for the Lawrence Tract— which includes homes on Lawrence Lane, Greer Road and Colorado Avenue — took shape in 1945. The Palo Alto Fair Play Council, a civil rights group organized by Midpeninsula activists Gerda Isenberg and Josephine Duveneck, helped secure support, land and funding for the development. The group initially helped Japanese Americans find housing and jobs after World War II internment and later expanded its mission to support other minority communities.
The concept emerged at a time when racially restrictive covenants in property deeds barred minority groups from many neighborhoods. Although the U.S. Supreme Court ruled such covenants unenforceable in 1948, segregation persisted through lending practices and local policies, with the Federal Housing Administration often denying financing for integrated developments.
“We had no illusions of solving the housing problem, but we wanted to do something,” Isenberg told Loretta Green, a journalist and Palo Alto resident, during an interview that appeared in the Peninsula Times Tribune in 1980. “I had no more idea of how to set it up than the man in the moon. The meetings were so frustrating. My lawyers said we should give it up.”
From concept to reality
The Lawrence Tract wasn’t the first attempt in Palo Alto to create an interracial housing development. In 1940, Pulitzer-Prize novelist and environmentalist Wallace Stegner, who founded the Stanford Creative Writing Program, joined 150 families to form the Peninsula Housing Association to establish a large cooperative community. The project collapsed after the Federal Housing Administration refused to approve financing because it included Black families.
The Lawrence Tract overcame similar challenges. Some nearby residents initially objected and put their homes up for sale, but opposition faded after a series of community meetings.
Securing the land also required persistence. The city of Palo Alto had declined to participate in low-cost federal housing, so the Fair Play Council purchased the property independently. Ten committee members each contributed $250, and Paul Lawrence — a Black former Stanford student and Howard University professor who played a central role in making the project a reality — hand-delivered the money to the realtor the next day. When another buyer tried to purchase the land for a higher price, the owner honored the Fair Play group’s agreement.
Both the neighborhood and a nearby park were later named in Lawrence’s honor.
Building an integrated community
When the neighborhood opened in 1950, it was home to nine Black families, six Japanese families, one Chinese family and seven white families. Each group owned roughly a third of the lots, and a committee of residents reviewed house plans to maintain community standards, with decisions subject to a two-thirds vote of property owners, local papers reported at the time.
The homes, according to a Palo Alto Times article published on Feb. 23, 1950, were modest three-bedroom redwood houses costing about $9,000, on lots averaging 6,000 square feet. Deeds required that homes cost at least $5,000, and parcels were priced at $925, plus assessments. Frontage widths ranged from 50 to 54 feet. Residents also agreed to dedicate 1.5 acres to the city for a recreation area.
To help preserve the neighborhood’s diversity, agreements encouraged homeowners who sold to offer their properties to buyers of the same racial group.
The goal, according to the Fair Play Council, was “to show that different races could get along and live together. ”
A lasting legacy
Though rising home prices had shifted the neighborhood’s demographics by 1980, as Green pointed out in her article, the tract remains a landmark example of an early, voluntary effort to create an integrated community at a time when such efforts were rare — and often met with resistance.
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