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Michael Corrigan's message to his potential neighbors has been pointed and unequivocal ... but it's certainly not racist.

The West Beverly neighbor posted signs that read, "Say no to the ghetto," "White power" and "Mt. Greenwood - the next Englewood." A small noose hung from his garage as well.

Although the signs had been up for nearly a year, the commission didn't express its concerns until very recently, in the wake of media reports just a couple weeks ago.

The Chicago Human Relations Commission believes that Corrigan, who lives in the 9900 block of South Fairfield Avenue, has violated state and federal laws because it's illegal to intimidate people from buying a home based on their race.

"We recognize that people have First Amendment rights to express their opinions even if they are repugnant to others," commission chairman Dana Starks said in a statement.

The commission doesn't often ask the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate a case. And maybe that's a good thing, considering that - despite Corrigan's inherent feelings about maintaining a white majority in the neighborhood - he has not committed a crime.

Let’s get a couple facts straight to begin with.

First, there’s no way I can defend the noose. Even if you remove the racial stigma, you still have a noose. It is what it is: A makeshift instrument designed for one purpose – to end life. Period.

Second, in 2008 the 22nd District was among the top four in the city in which the most hate crimes were reported – yet nearly one-third of all hate crimes that year were determined to be unfounded, according to Chicago Police Department.

There’s so much more going on here than one guy posting potentially racist and intimidating signs. The kinds of people who would move into Beverly or Mount Greenwood – white or black – are not the kind of people who normally allow their neighborhoods to go downhill. Plus, there’s a lot of multifamily housing in higher-crime neighborhoods. Not so in Beverly and Mount Greenwood. Even rental properties, which can be a magnet for criminal elements, are often owned by suburban whites who don’t take the proper care to maintain their properties or conduct the appropriate background checks on their tenants.

So even though his methods are inflammatory and uninventive (seriously, a noose?), the message of his concern is real and shared by many in the neighborhood.

Corrigan maintains that his signs are "yard art," which is a joke in itself. Come on, let's say it like it is: He's concerned that home values will drop and crime will rise – just as they have in nearby Englewood and even Morgan Park in the last decade.

White flight from the Southwest Side has been ongoing for more than 30 years. And that white flight continues even in the collar counties: Nearly 140,000 whites had left suburban Cook County between 1990 and 2003 while more than 131,000 blacks moved in.

But it’s not always to the detriment of the neighborhood.

Look at Beverly, where white flight began in the 1970s and now one-third of its residents are black. But these are black people who own houses that I couldn’t even afford … and I don’t think that my neighborhood is in any danger of going downhill just because of me – so it largely depends on the type of people who are buying and the property values.

White flight took place in Beverly in the ‘70s and ‘80s because neighbors had the same concerns as Corrigan today. Those didn’t pan out: Property values are still among the highest on the South Side, the crime rate is half of the city’s average, and its public schools consistently outperform district and state averages.

On the other hand, look at Morgan Park, where housing values remain lower, public school performance lags behind the district average (which is low to begin with), and where the number of crimes in 2008 (1,285) exceeded the number of crimes in Beverly (793) and Mount Greenwood (345) combined!

Admittedly, most of those crimes and lower-valued properties are in the Dan Ryan corridor (in the last two weeks alone there have been more than 30 crimes between the Dan Ryan and Halsted ranging from domestic battery to narcotics possession, and last month a 20-year-old man was shot and killed at 112th and Hermosa – the latest in a string of otherwise unrelated murders in the neighborhood).

Now let’s look at the scapegoat of Corrigan’s ire. Everybody knows Englewood is black – so with Corrigan’s reference to that neighborhood, coupled with Mount Greenwood’s reputation as a white enclave, Corrigan is insinuating that this is a black thing.

In reality, ethnicity has very little to do with it. In West Ridge, the “white power” sign would be taken as an affront to Pakistanis. The same goes for South Lawndale, where Mexican residents would be offended.

What’s most telling is that crime, school performance and housing values are nearly always a reflection of neighborhood’s investment in its quality of life – no matter what the race is.

Consider the following neighborhoods:

• In the Grand Boulevard (Bronzeville) neighborhood, where blacks make up 97.7% of the population, the median home price is a decent $239,000, according to the Chicago Tribune. Similarly, the crime rate is almost four times lower than that of Austin, which recorded the most crimes in the city in 2008, according to the Chicago Police Department’s annual report. Although the neighborhood’s public schools rank about 20 percentage points below the statewide average on the Illinois Standards Achievement Test (ISAT), they rank higher than CPS schools in the Auburn Gresham neighborhood (98% black), where barely half of public school students meet or exceed ISAT standards. That’s undoubtedly a reflection of the neighborhood’s median home price (a low $155,000) and its crime rate, which ranked eighth in the city in 2008 at 4,585 crimes. It also logged 19 murders, among the top 10 most deadly neighborhoods in the city.

• In the McKinley Park neighborhood, Hispanics still make up a large majority of the population (61.5%). Comparatively, property values are stable and impressive, with the median home price at $240,000. It’s also one of the top 20 safest neighborhoods in the city, reporting no murders and only 765 total crimes in 2008. Its school performance is modest, but with 69% of public school students meeting or exceeding ISAT standards, they outperform the district. The neighborhood just to the west is South Lawndale (Little Village), where the Hispanic population is 83% and the median home price is more than 40% below that of McKinley Park, at $104,000. Not surprisingly, Chicago police have alleged gang involvement in many recent crimes in South Lawndale, which logged 2,536 crimes and 21 murders in 2008. Similarly, its schools are faltering with an average ISAT performance score of 61% -- well below the state average of 79.8% and even the district average of 67.5%.

• Even in Asian neighborhoods the quality-of-life disparity can be felt along the same lines. Almost one-quarter of North Park’s residents are Asian, making it one of the more popular places in the city to settle for that ethnic group. The median home price of $253,500, one of the lowest crime rates (630 reported crimes in 2008) and high-performing schools (where an average of 72% of students meet or exceed ISAT standards) all make for a high quality of life. To the east, though, where the median home price in West Ridge is $161,250 and several elementary schools barely exceed the district average on ISAT performance, there were 2,113 crimes in 2008 – among the most on the far North Side.

When you buy a house, it’s an investment. You want to see your investment grow. In this economy, often the only decent assets we have are our homes – but when housing values start to decline, and the neighborhoods inevitably follow, what else is left? When the neighborhood goes, that’s it.

Mount Greenwood is popular among city workers who have to follow residency requirements. But if housing values drop, and children’s safety begins to decline, where else can city workers go?

Corrrigan’s signs are nothing more than the anxiety of a guy who’s saying what a lot of people in the area don’t want to talk about in public – which is that they are concerned that Beverly and Mount Greenwood will start to decline.

Look at Morgan Park, where nearly half of all community concerns filed with the 22nd District involve drugs and gangs. It’s no coincidence that the neighborhood has been affected the most by white flight and changing demographics.

Even Morgan Park’s quality of life is on shaky ground. A friend who’s a Chicago police officer told me his house has been broken into four times since he bought it just a couple years ago – and he’s black.

Neighborhood elementary schools perform lower than those in Beverly and Mount Greenwood, and the median home price – $202,500 – is $15,000 lower than in blue-collar Mount Greenwood.

It’s not a secret that Mount Greenwood neighbors live in one of the most white-friendly neighborhoods in the city, where anxiety over minorities is a real fear for long-time residents who have seen neighborhoods just 5-10 miles away turn for the worse. According to the Chicago Police Department, two-thirds of all violent crime victims are black, and 44% of all victims of property crimes are black. Nobody wants to be a victim, especially if you live in some of the safest neighborhoods in the city. That’s something every homeowner would fight for.

This shouldn’t be about Michael Corrigan. The Department of Justice does not need to be involved here. What needs to happen is an acceptance of what is reality: Some neighborhoods are more diverse than others. But not every neighborhood needs to be a rainbow coalition (Oak Park is; Naperville is not … Morgan Park is; Mount Greenwood is not … Hyde Park is; Pilsen is not).

The bottom line is that this isn’t news; it’s not what we should be discussing.

What we should be discussing are the economic and social factors that play into changing neighborhoods. But that kind of discussion is a long and academic one, something that many people don’t want to participate in for a variety of reasons – they’re comfortable in their bungalows and their children are safe in school, so they don’t worry about the long-term effects of a neighborhood going downhill.

Since I’ve already probably ticked off the black community, I might as well tick off the white community: Don’t be hypocrites. A lot of these laws and regulations are in place because a century ago Irish Catholics were the blacks of today. They were discriminated against in business, in housing, in religion, in politics – and yet here we are in some of the most heavily Irish neighborhoods in the city, known for our aversion to outsiders moving in and taking our jobs, taking our housing and ruining our quality of life.

History often repeats itself. Let’s not let that happen in this case.