Palm Beach Shifts Integration Focus to Housing

By Peter Schmidt

Boca RATON, FLA.--This community of plush homes, golf courses, and polo grounds hardly has a reputation as a place where a middle-class black family can find a good housing buy.

But, thanks to an apparently unprecedented desegregation policy adopted by the Palm Beach County school board, at least one developer here recently has been going out of its way to reach the African-American market.

Levitt Corporation, which developed an apartment complex here called St. James Club, has been offering reduced rents to black apartment-hunters, marketing its townhouses in black newspapers, and taking other steps to attempt a...