Moving to Integration? The Origins of Chicago’s Gautreaux Program and the Limits of Voucher-Based Housing Mobility

In the summer of 1966, four years after the completion of the massive Robert Taylor Homes complex on the city’s South Side, African American tenants of Chicago’s public housing projects filed class action discrimination lawsuits against the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). The plaintiffs charged both agencies with the deliberate concentration of the city’s federally assisted low-income public housing in poor, predominantly black neighborhoods. Named for a resident of another South Side project, these Gautreaux cases went on to gain national attention both for their legal precedents and for the creation of a voucher program that moved public housing families to the Chicago suburbs.

In recent decades, major works in policy and urban history have demonstrated how, by the 1960s, the salience of race in local governance led housing officials to knowingly segregate public housing like that in Chicago. But the story of urban projects’ decline and failure in the following decades at times takes on an air of inevitability. ¹ The history of urban public housing was not simply a long march toward an unchallenged fate of racial containment, isolation, and eventual demolition in the 1990s. Scholars have yet to adequately explore the civil rights activism surrounding majority-black inner-city projects in the years immediately following the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, when advocates of racial and economic justice drew on federal legislation and Supreme Court decisions favorable to integration to contest the racial isolation of public housing, attempting to alter policy to prevent future discriminatory site selections and remedy past segregation. An examination of the origins and the early workings of the Gautreaux Assisted Housing Program highlights this activism while also revealing the limits of the policy tools and strategies available to civil rights organizations in the face of an ideological turn away from affirmative desegregation plans toward the politics of privatization, devolution, and a color blindness that sought to divorce questions of race from those of class. ² We can better understand this process by more fully exploring the implications of the 1974 Housing and Community Development Act, which terminated large-scale public housing construction in favor of voucher-based assistance. Newly created Section 8 rent certificates increased reliance on the private housing market and dramatically reduced the number of units built precisely at the moment when civil rights advocates and some local and federal officials saw public housing as a potential tool of residential integration.

Although the Gautreaux plaintiffs originally envisioned a more ambitious program of metropolitan-wide public housing construction and integration, both the changing parameters of federal low-income housing policy and shifts in civil rights jurisprudence eliminated these remedial options. In the early 1970s, the courts adopted a narrowed view of discrimination and constitutional violation premised on a strict definition of intent and deference to jurisdictional boundaries. In the case of Chicago, this legal environment confined the plaintiffs to the use of rent certificates in privately owned housing. The resulting program was small, finite, and slow to move families, relying on existing housing, voluntary landlord compliance, and the willingness and ability of individual black families to relocate to the suburbs. A historical account of the Gautreaux program explores the relationship between the 1974 turn to rent certificates and the individual approach and limited enforcement powers of the 1968 Fair Housing Act, underscoring the uncertain and at times contradictory connections between public policy and the private market. Because the Section 8 certificates intended to increase housing mobility for low-income African Americans were used in private housing, they were subject to rising rents and low vacancy rates, limiting the number of units available to eligible families, particularly in affluent white suburbs. While Section 8 housing was purported to embrace the “efficiency” and “choice” of the private market, the relative property values of private housing were not simply a function of market forces but had been shaped and subsidized by state interventions, including mortgage “redlining,” that created a discriminatory real estate economics. The Gautreaux program therefore illustrates the challenges of using voucher-based assistance to racially and economically desegregate metropolitan housing markets undergirded by racialized public policies and largely unaltered by the limited interventions of federal fair housing law.

The reliance on rent certificates also introduced into the litigation the provision of relocation counseling, lending the Gautreaux program something of a rehabilitative function. Because these certificates provided poor blacks access to private housing in white neighborhoods where they would live alongside “regular” renters, program administrators screened tenants to ensure that they would make the move successfully and educated participants in the norms and expectations of the private market. The Gautreaux program was premised on the relocation of individual families who would act as racial “pioneers” in their new suburban neighborhoods, redrawing the scope of the settlement from one of providing access to suburban housing as a remedy for racial injustice to one limited to those CHA tenants who could find affordable apartments and would be “good tenants.”

When the Gautreaux lawsuits were launched in 1966, the city of Chicago had already completed its construction of what Arnold Hirsch has labeled its racialized “second ghetto.” Beginning in the 1940s, the slum clearance and site selection policies of the CHA, acting in cooperation with the Chicago City Council, which had approval over proposed sites, not only reinforced the boundaries of the black ghetto but also lent them a state-sanctioned authority and permanence. Between 1955 and 1968, 99.4 percent of the total public housing units built in Chicago were located in majority-black census tracts, and by the late 1960s, 99 percent of the CHA’s tenants were African American. The CHA also maintained strict racial quotas at four of its oldest projects—Trumbull Park, Lathrop, Lawndale, and Mayor Richard J. Daley’s Irish-Catholic neighborhood of Bridgeport—where the majority of residents were white, holding units in these developments vacant until white tenants were found. ³

The Gautreaux cases emerged from this context of state-sponsored segregation and drew from both grassroots activism and the passage of federal legislation. The cases were first launched when members of the Civil Rights Committee of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Chicago Urban League approached Alexander Polikoff, a Chicago attorney doing pro bono work for the ACLU. These groups were passing on a complaint from the West Side Federation (WSF), a coordinating body for West Side civil rights groups. ⁴ Noting that all proposed public housing was slated for black neighborhoods, the WSF argued that the CHA’s site selections violated Title VI of the recently enacted Civil Rights Act, which barred racial discrimination in federally funded programs. The WSF had previously voiced these complaints to the federal Public Housing Administration, the precursor to HUD, in August 1965, only to be told that these areas were the “location preference” tenants indicated on their housing applications and that no other sites were available to the CHA. ⁵ The plaintiffs filed the class action suits against the CHA and HUD in Illinois District Court in the summer of 1966, entering them as related cases that would have the same presiding judge, Richard Austin. The cases alleged that CHA’s site selection policies violated the Fourteenth Amendment and demanded relief under Title VI. ⁶ Polikoff selected as the named representative Dorothy Gautreaux, a civil rights activist and a resident of the South Side Altgeld-Murray apartments. Gautreaux had first applied for CHA housing in 1953, when she, her husband, and their four children lived in a one-bedroom apartment. At the time of her application, a CHA clerk informed her that she would secure an apartment “promptly” if she selected a unit in a majority-black project. Knowing that the CHA excluded African American tenants from white projects, Gautreaux followed the clerk’s advice and listed Dearborn Homes, also on the South Side, as her first choice. ⁷

The Gautreaux Assisted Housing Program grew out of the suit against HUD, which was held in abeyance until 1970 while litigation proceeded against the CHA. In February 1969, Judge Austin issued a summary judgment finding the Housing Authority liable of discrimination, stating that no criterion other than race could plausibly explain its site selections. ⁸ Austin then signed a court order instructing the authority to “scatter” future sites; the CHA was required to build its next seven hundred public housing units in census tracts with a population that was at least 70 percent white, and after this number was reached, it must locate three units in these majority-white areas for every one unit it built in census tracts that were 70 percent black. These scattered-site projects were to be low density, housing a maximum of 120 persons, and the CHA was prohibited from building in any census tract where public housing would account for 15 percent of the total housing stock. ⁹ Because over 90 percent of the households on the waiting list were African American, projects built in white areas would have majority or exclusively black tenancy, making them potential islands of segregation. Judge Austin therefore instructed the CHA to temporarily close its waiting lists and engage in a period “intensive publicity,” designed to encourage white families to apply for housing, after which the list would be opened to new registrants. In addition, up to half of the units in new projects could be reserved for neighborhood residents who met income eligibility, a measure intended both to create integrated projects and to lessen potential hostility in white communities. ¹⁰

Despite these concessions to white neighborhoods, the City Council and the CHA moved at a glacial pace to implement the court order. Having recently witnessed the white violence that had greeted the 1966 open housing marches by Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Chicago Freedom Movement, Mayor Richard J. Daley was anxious to preserve the city’s highly racialized political geography and contain the forces of racial polarization and white flight. Daley publicly denounced the scattered site plan, arguing that public housing should be built in the suburbs or in low-income areas where it was “needed.” ¹¹ Allied with Daley, the CHA and the City Council tied up the court order in appeals, procedural delays, and outright obstruction. In 1970, CHA executive director Charles Swibel informed Polikoff that the authority had no intention of submitting a list of sites until after the April 1971 municipal elections, hoping to suppress any discussion of integration that could prove politically costly to Daley and his fellow Democratic machine aldermen. When the courts ordered the CHA to produce potential sites prior to the election, the City Council, loyal to the mayor, buried the list in committee until months after voters went to the polls. Even after the City Council lost its approval of site selections in 1972, the CHA continued to drag its feet on providing sites and commencing construction. It was not until 1975 that the first scattered site projects were finally completed, with a total of sixty-three units. Although the CHA had built thousands of units in black neighborhoods in the 1960s, it took six years to erect fewer than one hundred units in white neighborhoods. ¹²

Two years after the ruling against the CHA, HUD was found to have knowingly funded the authority’s segregated site selections and tenant assignments. Judge Austin initially dismissed the case, stating that the federal department was not liable for discrimination on the part of the CHA, but the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the ruling, finding that HUD had willingly acquiesced in the building of public housing on sites selected on racial grounds. ¹³ After the Appellate Court returned the case to district court to work out a remedial order, the plaintiffs requested that the CHA be ordered to build public housing across the metropolitan area to create housing opportunities for low-income blacks in the suburbs. ¹⁴ Frustrated by the lack of progress in scattered-site construction, the Gautreaux lawyers argued that not enough low-income housing could be built in majority-white census tracts within Chicago’s municipal boundaries to provide homes for a significant number of poor blacks. Polikoff also pointed out that federal policies had fostered white flight to the suburbs while confining poor blacks to the inner cities, making the suburbs “an appropriate geographic area” for the building of public housing designed to foster integration. The plaintiffs’ briefs and oral arguments for metropolitan relief were based on the recent decision by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals to uphold interdistrict busing in the Detroit metropolitan area, affirming a court order that included fifty-three suburban school districts in Detroit’s integration plans. Judge Austin denied the motion, stating that discrimination had occurred within the city of Chicago, not in the suburbs, and a metropolitan solution would allow Chicago to “pass off” its problems onto surrounding municipalities. Austin instead ordered HUD to use its “best efforts” to cooperate with the CHA in increasing the supply of housing in accordance with the scattered-site order. The plaintiffs appealed this decision, but their plan for a metropolitan-wide public housing program ran into a significant shift in civil rights jurisprudence. ¹⁵

In the early 1970s, the Supreme Court, under Chief Justice Warren Burger, moved toward what critical legal scholar Derrick Bell calls the “myopia of color-blindness” in civil rights cases. ¹⁶ The Court, partly in response to white hostility to the prospect of suburban integration, exhibited an increasing reluctance to challenge more “subtle” forms of discrimination that were ostensibly race-neutral functions of economics. This color-blind stance rejected discriminatory effects as evidence of a constitutional violation, making the demonstration of intent the test of discrimination. In both James v. Valtierra (1971), which upheld California’s mandatory public referenda for low-income housing, and Warth v. Seldin (1975), which sanctioned a Rochester suburb’s exclusionary zoning laws, the Court held that a locality’s exclusion of public housing or multifamily rental housing was strictly economic, and therefore not subject to civil rights law. ¹⁷

Civil rights advocates did claim a victory in 1971 with Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg. In the first Supreme Court decision on the divisive busing issue, the Burger Court ruled that the two-way transportation plan proposed for the school district of Charlotte-Mecklenburg, North Carolina, was “reasonable, feasible, and workable.” ¹⁸ But even as it marked a triumph for affirmative integration plans, Swann also outlined the limits of a broader attack on the barriers of residential segregation. The opinion stated that the case did not extend to the consideration of school segregation as a product of residential segregation but was limited solely to the discriminatory actions of particular school boards. The nine justices, Chief Justice Warren Burger wrote, “do not reach in this case” the decision that school segregation as “a consequence of other types of state action” besides those of school authorities was a constitutional violation requiring a school desegregation remedy. Moreover, the existence of exclusively black or white schools was not itself evidence of legal segregation. The Burger Court adopted a narrow view of discrimination, one that did not include “all the problems of racial prejudice,” even when those “problems” contributed to the concentration of students by race. ¹⁹ The Court excluded from the scope of state action the racialized housing policies that lay at the base of segregated public education. Racially restrictive federal mortgage insurance policies “redlined” black and integrated neighborhoods, writing racial exclusions into appraisal guidelines and giving government sanction to the argument that the racial homogeneity of white neighborhoods stabilized property values and minimized investment risk. These federally administered selective credit processes were also adopted by private lenders, leading to a systematic redirection of capital away from increasingly poor and black inner cities and restricting the entry of minorities into burgeoning suburbs. With Swann, the Court opted for a cautious position that established the framework for future decisions on busing and perpetuated the myth that school segregation outside the Jim Crow South was “de facto,” the unfortunate byproduct of residential patterns dictated by economics or individual choice. ²⁰

Before the appeal of Judge Austin’s decision on metropolitan-wide construction could be heard, the Supreme Court ruled on Milliken v. Bradley, striking down metropolitan-wide school busing in Detroit and stating that that the nature of a remedial order must match the scope of the constitutional violation; because the fifty-three suburban school districts that would be included in the busing plan had not engaged in discriminatory conduct, their incorporation with Detroit into a “desegregation area” constituted “impermissible interference” with local government. The Court declared that “without an interdistrict violation and interdistrict effect, there is no constitutional wrong calling for an interdistrict remedy.” As in the Swann decision, the Court did not “reach” into the realm of housing, confining its definition of a constitutional violation to the actions of the school boards and limiting the definition of suburban complicity by avoiding mention of the institutional metropolitan racism that had created the virtually all-white suburbs that fed these “neighborhood” schools. ²¹ With the Milliken decision, the possibility of metropolitan relief in the Gautreaux case was now in question. Continuing to press for suburban public housing construction, the plaintiffs’ counsel asserted that Milliken could be confined to schools because the “deeply-rooted tradition of local control over public schools” was distinct from federally administered public housing. ²² The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals concurred, ruling that because federal involvement in public housing was “pervasive,” in contrast to its involvement in local education, Milliken was not applicable to the Gautreaux case. The court also held that the segregation of public housing in suburban census tracts provided evidence of suburban discrimination, or the “interdistrict effect” to which Milliken referred. In addition, the white flight to suburbs and the resegregation of public housing that could result from building in the city alone must be considered in drawing up a remedy. ²³

HUD appealed this decision to the Supreme Court in Hills v. Gautreaux, maintaining that the Supreme Court had broadly declared that it was improper to use one municipality as a “racial reservoir” to remedy racial discrimination that occurred within a different jurisdiction. Rejecting the argument that HUD policies had fostered white flight, the department’s petition asserted that the Gautreaux case “lacks the factual foundation that would, under Milliken, justify interdistrict relief.” Because there had been no interdistrict violation, HUD argued, no interdistrict remedy was permissible. ²⁴ The Supreme Court delivered its decision in April 1976. Writing for the majority, Justice Potter Stewart framed the opinion around the precedent established by Milliken but nonetheless ruled that HUD could be ordered to take remedial action outside of Chicago. The Court held that HUD, unlike the suburban school districts of Detroit, had in fact violated the Constitution by sanctioning and assisting the CHA’s discriminatory policies. Stewart wrote that Milliken did leave room for distinctions; the decision did not create a firm rule that the courts could not compel parties who had violated the constitution to undertake remedial action outside the boundaries of the city where the violation had occurred. Because HUD had engaged in discriminatory conduct, and because “the relevant geographic area” of housing options was the Chicago metropolitan housing market, Hills v. Gautreaux deemed it “entirely appropriate and consistent with Milliken” to include the Chicago suburbs in desegregation remedies. The only requirement was that the scope of the remedy match the scope of the violation and that the court not “impermissibly interfere” with local government. ²⁵

The Court’s adherence to the principle of “impermissible interference,” however, ruled out the construction of suburban scattered-site housing. Hills v. Gautreaux instead looked to recent transformations in federal low-income housing policy to house CHA tenants outside of the city limits. In 1974, Congress passed the Housing and Community Development Act, marking a dramatic shift away from government construction of new public housing and an increased reliance on the private market to house poor families. The legislation created Section 8 housing, a program to subsidize the construction of privately developed multifamily housing and issue rent certificates (later known as vouchers) to be used by low-income families in privately owned, existing housing. Section 8 housing was attached to the community development bill that replaced categorical grants with block grants that served to increase local discretion, making the legislation part of an ideological shift that “devolved” greater powers to local governments and embraced the “efficiency” of the private sector. With the creation of rent certificates, HUD would pay the landlord the difference between 25 percent of the tenant’s income and the “fair market rent” for a particular unit, effectively transforming the department from a builder and owner of public housing to an agency that inspected units and issued subsidies to private landlords. ²⁶

The new policy came on the heels of President Richard Nixon’s eighteen-month moratorium on subsidized projects, during which the government sought to establish a more “appropriate” federal role in low-income housing. The move to tenant-based subsidies emerged from both a popular and an official narrative of “failed” low-income housing policies that had produced some of the worst housing in the nation, what Nixon labeled “monstrous depressing places—run down, overcrowded, crime-ridden, falling apart.” The 1972 demolition of the notorious Pruitt-Igoe project in St. Louis only two decades after its completion came to signify the failures of crumbling, segregated “federal slums.” ²⁷ Conventional public housing, Nixon argued, was not only dangerous and inhospitable but also wastefully expensive and inequitable, meaning that it did not serve the vast majority of citizens who were otherwise eligible. In addition, the president and HUD secretary James T. Lynn argued that the “root problem” of families living in inadequate housing was insufficient purchasing power, not an inadequate housing supply, meaning that the best solution was the creation of cash subsidies to households to supplement this income. The Nixon administration maintained that new construction could be counterproductive, hastening inner-city abandonment by offering “an alternative to the fixing up of existing housing.” Themes of empowerment and the language of “housing choice” also informed the development of rent certificates; Nixon and Lynn stated that a cash allowance program would “give the poor the freedom and responsibility to make their own choices about housing,” selecting their homes within the private market. Rather than assigning them to segregated and dangerous public housing that often carried a “stigma,” rent certificates would allow low-income families to move to the neighborhoods of their own choosing. ²⁸

The Hills decision stated that a metropolitan order based on the use of Section 8 rent certificates “would not entail coercion of uninvolved governmental units” because the legislation allowed HUD to contract directly with private owners to make leased housing units available. Because local government approval was not required, there would be no “coercive effect” on suburban municipalities. The remedy would neither “force” suburban governments to submit applications for public housing, nor would it displace their rights and powers over zoning, land-use restrictions, and conventional public housing plans. ²⁹ The confluence of the Milliken decision and the federal move to tenant-based subsidies therefore narrowed the scope of the plaintiffs’ original vision of a metropolitan solution and reflected the federal retreat from suburban desegregation that occurred under the Nixon and Ford administrations. George Romney, Nixon’s first HUD secretary, attempted to use public housing construction as a means of desegregating majority-white suburbs. Based on the Dayton, Ohio, “fair-share” allocation plan, in which fourteen thousand units of low-income housing would be distributed throughout the metropolitan area, Romney formulated the Open Communities program to create housing opportunities for low-income minorities, threatening to withhold HUD sewer and water grants from municipalities that refused to cooperate. ³⁰ The program was met with hostility in the white working-class Detroit suburb of Warren, which voted to reject federal funds if they were tied to integration requirements. Believing that Open Communities went too far in pursuit of fair housing and wary of alienating his suburban electoral base, Nixon ordered Romney to release the funds and in March 1971 issued a policy statement pledging his support for the principle of racial equality but declaring that his administration would not impose “economic integration” on any municipality. The statement offered a tacit acceptance of discrimination against the poor and represented an evasive position on the enforcement of suburban desegregation. Eliding the fact that public housing construction in Warren had been championed by Romney and resisted by whites precisely because it would permit the movement of racial minorities to white suburbs, the Nixon statement implied that if racial homogeneity in the suburbs was a product of economic distinctions, it was not illegal. ³¹

The president’s distinction between economic and racial integration came one year after his statement on busing that emphasized a supposed “fundamental difference” between “de jure” and “de facto” segregation, the latter of which resulted from housing patterns and “does not violate the Constitution.” The disputes surrounding busing therefore influenced not only the legal precedents for housing integration but also the political discourse in which policy debates were carried out; taken together, Nixon’s pronouncements on housing and busing outlined a color-blind politics of minimal compliance with the law, one that framed residential population distributions as the outcome of individual choice and race-neutral economic forces. ³² “Open housing” thus came to mean formal legal equality and the ability to move to any neighborhood within one’s economic means, not a substantive policy to dismantle segregation. In this context, the turn away from conventional public housing allowed the federal government to avoid the prospect of desegregation through suburban construction and the subsequent controversies in majority-white neighborhoods; rent certificates and private development not only increased efficiency and the stanching of the supposed “waste” of conventional public housing but also were a means to avoid “forced integration” and appease suburban whites. The Section 8 housing legislation established the objective of “deconcentration” of low-income household but included no goals for racial desegregation. Instead, any steps toward integration would rely on the mobility and housing choice of individual families and the availability of rental housing in white neighborhoods at rates below the “fair market rent.” ³³

Following the Hills v. Gautreaux decision, the plaintiffs’ counsel devised a housing demonstration program that would provide members of the Gautreaux plaintiff class—defined as residents of CHA projects or those on the authority’s waiting lists—with Section 8 certificates to be used in privately owned housing throughout the Chicago metropolitan area, including the five counties of Cook, DuPage, Will, Kane, and Lake. In June 1976, the attorneys and HUD signed a letter of agreement creating the Gautreaux demonstration program as a one year trial. Four hundred of the over forty thousand families in the plaintiff class would use Section 8 certificates to find existing housing throughout the Chicago metropolitan area, with three-quarters of the recipients required to use their certificates in neighborhoods that were majority white. In addition, the four hundred units would be dispersed throughout each of the five counties, a measure intended to prevent resegregation in the suburbs. ³⁴ To aid CHA tenants in navigating the private rental market, HUD entered into a contract for counseling services with the Leadership Council for Metropolitan Open Communities, a local open housing organization created in the wake of the 1966 Freedom Movement in Chicago and the subsequent Summit Agreement between city officials and the movement leadership. The demonstration agreement required counselors from the Leadership Council to assist members of the plaintiff class in finding vacant units and to locate owners and landlords willing to participate in the program. The aim was to find housing for approximately forty families per month, with the Leadership Council contacting families from both the CHA’s waiting list and a random 10 percent sample of all eligible families residing in CHA projects. The demonstration was renewed annually through letters with HUD until 1981, when a consent decree gave it a semipermanent status; the Gautreaux program would run until 7,100 families relocated, a goal reached in 1997. ³⁵

By early 1977, both the plaintiffs’ attorneys and the Leadership Council expressed concerns over the small number of families who successfully used their Section 8 certificates. In the first six months of the program, a total of 23 families were placed, as opposed to the goal of 40 per month, and after one year, only 115 families had relocated. ³⁶ One of the most significant obstacles to the implementation of the Gautreaux voucher program was the gap between the actual cost of rent and HUD’s fair market rents (FMRs), the maximum rents allowed for Section 8 certificate holders in a given jurisdiction. Because of low vacancy rates, many parts of the Chicago area had higher rents than could be paid using a Section 8 certificate. In reports and correspondence with HUD, both Polikoff and the Leadership Council asserted that, if the program was to operate successfully, the department needed to significantly increase FMRs, especially in Cook and DuPage Counties, where the majority of the rentals exceeded the FMR. ³⁷ In 1977, the director of the Assisted Housing Programs at the Leadership Council concluded that without a substantial increase in FMRs, “units presently occupied by Gautreaux families will be unavailable for lease renewal when leases expire,” while there remained “real uncertainty as to whether sufficient new units can be found.” ³⁸ Moreover, FMRs were standard for the entire metropolitan area, rather than determined by county or municipality. HUD’s regional FMRs undermined the truly metropolitan scope of the desegregation plan. Because these rent ceilings were based on averages rather than actual cost, more expensive areas were almost always out of range of Gautreaux families, effectively excluding affluent white suburbs from court-ordered desegregation by virtue of their high property values, further undermining the goal of residential integration. The Leadership Council found that using one FMR for the entire Chicago metropolitan area weighted housing searches to older and less expensive areas, usually in townships far from the city or in suburbs bordering the working-class neighborhoods of southwestern Chicago. The FMRs hampered racial and economic dispersal, directing Gautreaux families to “low-cost areas” and making “a farce of the intended goals of the Section 8 program.” ³⁹ A Leadership Council survey of rental listings from July 1981 found that in the Rogers Park area of Chicago, and in the neighboring lakeside suburb of Evanston, most listed apartment rentals exceeded FMRs, with many three-bedroom apartments exceeding the rent ceilings by over 60 percent. In the North Cook County suburbs of Winnetka and Highland Park, every unit listed was above the FMR. ⁴⁰

Because Gautreaux movers frequently located in housing in newly developed outlying areas, they often lacked access to public transportation, making it difficult for low-income families to do their grocery shopping, visit the doctor, or spend time with friends and family. In a 1978 Leadership Council survey of transportation needs of program participants, forty-five of sixty-five respondents stated that traveling had been their largest problem since moving to their new location, with nearly half indicating that in the past year they had decided not to apply for or accept a job because it was “too hard to get to.” ⁴¹ Leadership Council reports for HUD also noted that the lack of adequate public transportation in areas with high vacancies required families placed in the program to have automobiles. Indeed, by 1978 the Leadership Council added the prerequisite of a car to the invitational letters it sent to members of the Gautreaux plaintiff class who may be interested in participating in the program. The need for a vehicle was especially challenging for public aid recipients, who at the time could not have more than $150 in the bank and could not use welfare funds to make payments on an automobile. Because 60 percent of CHA tenants were on public assistance, the majority of families contacted and interested in the demonstration program did not have a car. ⁴²

Chicago’s housing market posed a particular problem for families with more than two children. As of 1976, the average size of households in CHA family housing was 4.1 persons, with an average of 2.8 children per family, and 40 percent of the plaintiff class required apartments with three or more bedrooms. Units of this size accounted for only 5 percent of apartments on the rental market, a number that was further reduced because of low FMRs that made three-bedroom units unaffordable. ⁴³ Six months into the demonstration, the Leadership Council informed HUD that “[w]e should accept the fact that the market contains primarily two-bedroom units and adjust our owner and client procedures accordingly,” and in February 1977, the organization revised its policies to limit notification letters to those families who were eligible for two-bedroom apartments, noting its long waiting lists for larger units. Within two years, the constraints of voucher-based assistance in the private rental market had winnowed down the list of prospective participants to families with two or three children who had access to a car. ⁴⁴

The Gautreaux data mirrored national results for the general Section 8 program; both Senate oversight hearings and HUD studies of Section 8 housing found structural and administrative flaws in FMR calculations that inhibited the operation of the program. ⁴⁵ Despite this national evidence and regular reporting from the Leadership Council, HUD did not significantly raise the rent levels. In May 1977, HUD published its newly proposed FMRs for existing housing, with the rent levels suggested for the Chicago metropolitan area substantially below those recommended by both the Leadership Council and economists in HUD’s Area and Regional offices, and in some cases below the special exceptions HUD had previously granted for more expensive areas such as suburban DuPage County. The Leadership Council again concluded that the proposed FMRs were “too low for the effective operation” of the Gautreaux program in the suburban counties. ⁴⁶ HUD responded that the department was “under some constraint to keep metropolitan areas in correspondence with each other” and that Chicago was “already among the highest metropolitan areas in the country,” making further increases unlikely. HUD also stated that its officials were operating “under a directive from the Office of Management and Budget to have standardized fair market rents within a metropolitan area.” HUD wished to have this policy changed, but as yet had been unsuccessful. ⁴⁷ Rent certificates therefore exhibited something of a contradictory relationship to the private housing market; the federal government expected the private sector to house the poor in increasing numbers but seemed to be disengaged from the realities of housing costs and real-world “market rents.” Funding decisions circumscribed the ability of Section 8 housing to achieve “deconcentration” by seemingly skirting a basic principle of real estate: housing in majority-white and suburban neighborhoods is more expensive than that in the inner city.

The challenges of FMRs identified by the Gautreaux program administrators more broadly illustrate the limited potential of vouchers to desegregate housing markets shaped by decades of redlining and discriminatory lending and still largely unaltered by civil rights law. Neighborhoods whose property values were intimately linked to their racial homogeneity would simply be too expensive for low-income families relying on federal rent certificates. In 1968, Congress passed the Fair Housing Act outlawing racial discrimination in sales or rentals, but the legislation’s individual approach, relying on complaints from persons who recognized that they had encountered discriminatory conduct, could do little to reverse the legacies of institutional racism. The use of individual enforcement belied the fact that residential racial segregation was not merely the product of individual and discrete acts of prejudice, downplaying the powerful role of the federal government in fostering white flight and creating the underdevelopment of majority-black inner cities. Fair housing law did not address the deeper systemic causes of residential segregation, leaving the entrenched metropolitan geography of black ghettos and affluent white suburbs beyond the purview of civil rights legislation. ⁴⁸

The effect of the 1974 Housing Act was to devolve responsibility for desegregation onto local governments, private developers, and low-income families themselves, leaving increased economic and racial integration largely as a matter of housing choice. The mechanisms of Section 8 housing purportedly offered low-income minorities living in central cities increased opportunities to reside in quality housing in middle-income and suburban communities, but such opportunities were largely theoretical. The expectation that increased purchasing power would lead to greater choice erroneously assumed that landlords and tenants were rational economic actors in race-neutral transactions and color-blind housing markets and ultimately accommodated a politics of suburban racial innocence, as outlined in Nixon’s policy statement and in key Supreme Court decisions, in which allegedly “economic” exclusion was not a constitutional violation. In reality, affluent white neighborhoods that had been subsidized by racially restrictive federal policy lay beyond the reach of Section 8 families participating in court-ordered desegregation.

An additional restraint on the placement of Gautreaux tenants—and inherent in the use of vouchers as a vehicle for integration—was the fact that landlord participation in the program was entirely voluntary, meaning that this model of housing desegregation and the fulfillment of housing choice could depend on the individual decisions of property owners and building managers. The Leadership Council faced the challenge of convincing apartment owners to make units available to Gautreaux families. ⁴⁹ The Leadership Council produced a “Manual for Owners and Managers,” a brochure that explained Section 8 rent certificates and contained information on the Gautreaux demonstration program, hoping to appeal to “the self-interest and the potential community services” that would come with participation in the program. Emphasizing tenant screening, the manual informed potential landlords that they would be provided with information on prospective tenants, including a credit report and income verification, letters of character reference, and a counselors’ report following a home visit. But these appeals were not sufficient to secure the participation of the majority of landlords contacted. ⁵⁰ A survey of the organization’s monthly reports demonstrates that the majority of landlords contacted declined to participate in the program. Between January and August 1977, the Leadership Council visited a total of 211 housing developments seeking prospective units; commitments to participate in the program came from just 38 landlords. In October of that year alone, the Council reported contacting 101 owners, with 7 agreeing to participate. During this time, the Leadership Council placed an average of fifteen families per month. ⁵¹

Many landlords were simply unfamiliar with the program or with the concept of tenant-based subsidies. The council’s 1978 report to HUD stated that in most cases “managers knew little of Section 8 or the demonstration program,” and staff spent much of their time explaining these policies. ⁵² Even if the landlords did choose to rent units to Gautreaux families, they could opt to leave the program after the initial lease period had expired. Reasons for withdrawing could range from financial motives, including conversion of the buildings to condominiums, to simple dislike of tenants. One landlord chose not to renew the leases of two Gautreaux families, stating that “Section 8 families don’t mix well with market rate tenants because of economic and social differences.” This decision came despite the fact that the Gautreaux tenants in his building were employed and the two parents were active in the community. ⁵³ Landlords could therefore decide they did not want to accept tenants who came with Section 8 certificates, thereby rejecting members of the plaintiff class. Even though racial discrimination in housing had been outlawed by Title VIII of the 1968 Civil Rights Act, managers could still thwart a program designed to foster desegregation by rejecting prospective tenants based on their source of (rental) income or their previous address in CHA housing. ⁵⁴

Members of the Gautreaux class were not expected to find housing in the suburbs on their own. Instead, they received assistance from Leadership Council staff who notified families of available housing and accompanied them on visits to prospective new homes. The Leadership Council’s counseling services also included housekeeping inspections and background checks to ensure that members of the plaintiff class were “suitable” tenants who would be easily assimilated into privately owned, majority-white housing. The counseling process began with a visit by a Leadership Council counselor to the prospective mover’s home, where the counselor attempted to determine the family’s “goals, its doubts, strengths, and weaknesses, as well as what the members are like as individuals.” If an applicant, most frequently a single mother, lived in a way that would “make it difficult for her to meet the standards of a private development—poor housekeeping, undisciplined children,” the counselor would likely discourage her from applying for housing. If income forms and housekeeping standards were deemed satisfactory, the Leadership Council then requested a credit check. ⁵⁵ The tenant screening process resulted in what a 1979 HUD report called “a substantial attrition rate among prospective participants”; because of large family size, the applicant’s inability to pay a security deposit, or what were deemed to be “poor housekeeping habits,” fewer than half of the home visits resulted in final applications. ⁵⁶

The Leadership Council noted that, in its early placements, staff had made a conscious decision to stress “quality” rather than “quantity,” ensuring that “the first families to move will all be fine tenants” who would “be good ‘examples’ of the program.” ⁵⁷ The organization’s emphasis on “quality” stemmed in part from a pragmatic view of what was possible under the Gautreaux program; given the high demand for a limited number of spaces, there was little point in relocating families who might be quickly evicted because of property damage or failure to pay rent on time. ⁵⁸ The counseling functions also drew on a longer tradition of combining civil rights with an emphasis on “uplift,” as the Leadership Council saw itself educating CHA tenants, some of whom had lived in public housing all of their lives, in the norms and expectations that came along with residing in private housing in certain neighborhoods. As one counselor stated, “This isn’t the CHA, this is the real world. If you don’t live up to the terms of the lease, you’ll be evicted.” ⁵⁹ This rehabilitation function also illustrates the degree to which the shift to the use of housing vouchers transformed the Gautreaux litigation. What began as an attempt to reshape metropolitan housing patterns through the construction of public housing in white suburbs, in the model of Open Communities, was transformed into a program to relocate select individuals to white communities where they would be racial pioneers and models of “quality” tenants. Although the city’s institutions, including the City Council and the CHA, had perpetuated residential segregation, it was now the movement of individual families that would facilitate integration. The Gautreaux mobility program was not administered as a policy to remediate the racial wrongs for all forty thousand families in the plaintiff class who had been subject to state-sponsored discrimination. Instead, it would aid those who could best make the transition to private market housing. ⁶⁰

In administering the counseling services, the Leadership Council negotiated a tricky balance between aiding and educating clients and reproducing landlords’ assumptions about—and heightened scrutiny of—public housing tenants, in some cases perpetuating the equation of poverty with immorality. Follow-up counseling services for landlords and tenants, designed to resolve disputes between the two parties and retain landlord participation, emerged from the Leadership Council’s observation that many landlords viewed Gautreaux families—usually female-headed African American families who received public assistance—as “undesirable tenants.” The council then developed the Supportive Services program as a way to mediate the “cultural differences” between white landlords and African American tenants. These “cultural differences” could arise because “some typical characteristics of black, inner-city Chicago families may be strange to suburban owners and managers,” including their “type of music, ways of reprimanding children, visiting by extended family.” ⁶¹ Despite the emphasis on “quality” tenants, some landlords still regarded Section 8 clients with mistrust, underscoring the uncertain relationship of the Gautreaux Assisted Housing Program to the private housing market: Gautreaux tenants were expected to conform to the expectations of this market but were consistently treated as different from their “market-rate” counterparts. Following the rejection of a woman from an apartment complex in Wheeling because of a shoplifting record, the property owner stated that “you have to understand that we have different criteria for those people who are paying a thousand dollars a month.” He admitted that he would not necessarily perform a criminal background check on a regular, but a CHA tenant would automatically be subject to screening for criminal behavior. ⁶²

Because the program relied on heavily scrutinized individuals, as participants in the private housing market, to become the agents of desegregation, the experiences of these movers are important in analyzing and historicizing the Gautreaux program. A valuable source for examining this issue is a set of surveys of Gautreaux participants conducted by the Leadership Council in 1982 asking tenants to describe and evaluate their experiences moving to suburban locations. Many of these assessments were positive, and respondents expressed gratitude at being able to participate, stating that the program offered them the opportunity for a better future, including safe and clean neighborhoods, improved municipal services, and quality schools. But these surveys also indicated a number of obstacles to the Gautreaux movers. The experience of being a “pioneer” of public housing desegregation at times came with emotional hardship, including loneliness and isolation, and financial struggle. Some residents reported that new neighbors greeted them with suspicion, viewing them as “outsiders,” while many stated that they had encountered racial discrimination. A man in Wilmette (Cook County) noted that “[p]eople are very uncomfortable with dark skin around,” adding that his son was stopped and questioned by police on his way to school after a neighbor phoned the authorities saying that “a suspicious man passed her house.” A single mother in Lisle (DuPage County) believed that school officials had “tracked” her daughter as a remedial student and labeled her as having a “behavioral problem” because of her race. ⁶³

Employment also proved to be a significant challenge to a number of the program participants. While the metropolitan model was originally conceived to provide low-income minorities with access to suburban jobs, many women remained on public assistance, and some even gave up their jobs in Chicago when they moved because of long commutes or lack of child care in their new communities. Some also indicated that they had experienced employment discrimination. A woman who relocated to Bolingbrook (Will and DuPage Counties) reported that even though she had experience working in a bank, she was turned down for a job that was advertised as “no experience [necessary], we will train.” She wrote that “I feel it’s because I’m black, I never had this kind of problem in the city.” Another woman said, “There needs to be a broad base of employment for Blacks in Bolingbrook. . . . We are only hired in department stores.” Other participants reported that they could not find adequate health care, as doctors were sometimes reluctant to accept patients on Medicaid. One Evanston woman noted that if anyone in her household fell ill, she would have to travel to Cook County Hospital in Chicago: “If I go to any other Hospital they will bill me for emergency services and there’s no money in my budget for medical service.” ⁶⁴

The difficulties cited by these Gautreaux families complicate the social science literature that emerged in the 1990s that emphasized the positive outcomes of the Gautreaux program. At a moment when scholars and policy makers grappled with the problem of the “urban underclass,” President Bill Clinton pledged to “end welfare as we know it,” and the National Commission on Severely Distressed Public Housing issued its report, the Gautreaux program found itself the subject of scholarly investigation. The deepening of the urban crisis of deindustrialization and poverty gripping many inner cities led policy makers and social scientists to turn new attention to a largely African American and Latino urban poor. This “underclass,” they argued, was trapped in a cycle of welfare dependency and was characterized by out-of-wedlock births, drug use, low high school graduation rates, and violent crime on the part of young males with no attachment to the workforce. The concept of the “underclass” itself borrowed from the cultural definitions of poverty that had emerged in previous decades and had been used by liberals to call for national action on poverty and by conservatives to demonize “welfare queens” and call for cuts to social spending. ⁶⁵

A focus on Chicago’s poorest families also stemmed from the publication of sociologist William Julius Wilson’s The Truly Disadvantaged in 1987. In this widely cited work, Wilson argued that black urban poverty was a product of the structural transformations in the urban economy, including the decline of urban manufacturing jobs and the rise of a low-wage service sector, and the spatial concentration of poverty that came as middle-class blacks moved away from older neighborhoods, leaving poor families behind. The result was the isolation of jobless African Americans from mainstream society and the subsequent development of “oppositional behaviors,” including a lack of participation in the regular labor market, criminal activity, and high rates of teenage pregnancy. ⁶⁶ Many of the studies of the housing mobility program that emerged in the 1990s cited their intellectual debt to Wilson, and social scientists saw the Gautreaux program as a way to test Wilson’s conclusions and to investigate the hypothesis that helping poor blacks move to so-called “geographies of opportunity” could eliminate the behavioral traits of the underclass. ⁶⁷ Although some scholars have pointed to the methodological limits of these studies, cautioning that the Gautreaux movers “self-selected” and may therefore be statistically unrepresentative, much of this literature concluded that the Gautreaux program produced positive “neighborhood effects” for participants, helping them to overcome economic and behavioral obstacles to upward mobility. Echoing the ecological model of “organic” urban relations developed by the sociologists at the Chicago school in the early twentieth century, this scholarship argued that environment and surroundings influence behavior and the degree of social “disorganization” exhibited by a particular group. Although the Chicago school saw social reorganization occurring over the course of generations as immigrant groups moved through different “zones” of the city, scholars of the Gautreaux program reported dramatic changes within years or months. ⁶⁸

The studies emphasize the satisfaction of Gautreaux movers with their suburban locations and the higher graduation and employment rates compared to those who remained in the city. Using surveys and interviews, social scientists found that even the “hard-core unemployed,” many of whom were single mothers on public assistance, were able to secure steady employment because of greater access to jobs, a sense of safety, and their own “increased motivation,” suggesting that housing assistance through the use of vouchers was an effective means of moving very low-income households from welfare to work. ⁶⁹ The studies also found that suburban movers experienced greater “social integration,” including the development of interracial friendships and positive role models, further illustrating the effects of neighborhood on underclass behavior. ⁷⁰ The Gautreaux model, scholars argued, created a spatial equality of opportunity, with new neighborhoods exhibiting a positive influence on the choices of low-income African Americans; poor and dysfunctional neighborhoods led to “bad” decisions regarding education, crime, fertility, and labor market participation, while quality neighborhoods resulted in improved decisions. ⁷¹ The popular news media, including 60 Minutes, CNN, and ABC News, picked up on these conclusions and transformed the findings into a celebration of the program’s successes. A 1992 Newsweek article concluded that the data on high school graduation and college enrolment rates were “stunning” and declared that the program provided evidence that “Integration (yes, integration) worked.” ⁷²

These narratives are problematic, however, because of the narrow criteria by which they define success, focusing only on individual results rather than a broader assault on institutional residential segregation. By this logic, the Gautreaux program “works” if heavily screened individuals from the “hard-core” poor find jobs, have positive interactions with their white neighbors, and remain in these middle-class areas. Because evaluations of the program were rooted in discussion of the “underclass,” they tended to reproduce the logic and assumptions of this conversation, showing little effort to consider black poverty historically, as opposed to individually. The focus on one-way mobility tends to define poverty as largely behavioral and cultural, emphasizing individual employment records, educational achievements, and “social integration” at the expense of discussions of structural inequality in housing, education, and access to employment. Much of this literature seems to take at face value the notion that there is an urban “underclass” whose oppositional behavior is need of correction to achieve integration into mainstream society. ⁷³ In addition, the emphasis on producing “positive neighborhood effects” for a limited number of participants begs the question of what remediation was offered to those who did not make the cut. The Gautreaux program was not designed to improve poor urban neighborhoods or even to address a shortage of affordable housing, and success stories devote little coverage to what happens to the neighborhoods that suburban movers leave behind. As Edward Goetz states, nowhere in the Gautreaux literature “is the issue of the condition of the participants’ ‘old’ neighborhoods raised, except to compare them unfavorably to the new ones.” ⁷⁴ Finally, part of the appeal of the Gautreaux program as a “success story” lay in its invisibility and the limited numbers of poor people of color who could move into any one neighborhood. Over a twenty-year period, the program relocated 7,100 families throughout 115 communities in a metropolitan area of over eight million people. As HUD noted in 1994, the Gautreaux program “works because its effect on neighborhood racial composition is imperceptible.” Those involved in the design and administration of the program ensured that “participants are dispersed among scattered metropolitan locations so that their arrival does not excite fears of racial or class ‘tipping.’” ⁷⁵

More recent scholarship—including research by those who previously pointed to the positive results of the Gautreaux program—has begun to emphasize the limits of this approach to desegregation. As Susan Popkin et al. argue, there has been little tracking of those families who moved back to the city or lost their Section 8 assistance and virtually no discussion of the majority of the participants who entered the program but were unable to move because of particularly tight housing markets. Polikoff has estimated that by the 1990s, some 80 percent of the families who received vouchers failed to find a suitable unit in a majority-white area, meaning that their certificate passed to another family. Even if tenant-based subsidies “work” for the families who are able to use them, the small scale and low leasing rate raise far more questions about the families who are not well served by existing housing. ⁷⁶

A historical view of the Gautreaux program illustrates how its logic and goals were circumscribed by the turn away from public housing construction toward vouchers, a reluctance to grant metropolitan-wide powers to build new housing, and the very nature of the private housing market. The voucher program did not originate with the plaintiffs but was created by the policy shifts and racial politics that emerged between the original suit in 1966 and the creation of the demonstration program a decade later. The confluence of these events resulted in a program that transformed civil rights plaintiffs into racial pioneers and clients of counseling, prepared to enter the private housing market. The Gautreaux program therefore underscores the broader challenges of relying on the private sector to achieve “housing choice” for low-income African Americans and the fallacy of a distinction between “economic” and racial exclusion; increased purchasing power did not lead to increased access to the affluent suburban communities whose very desirability was the product of federal interventions into homeownership that historically favored white neighborhoods. A federal embrace of purportedly race-neutral market-based solutions ultimately fostered an unspoken resistance to residential racial integration, one that relied on the economics of housing costs and failed to acknowledge the role of federal policy in creating metropolitan racial geographies. Obscuring the deep structural connections between race and economics, and constrained by FMRs and landlord compliance, individual, voucher-based mobility operated within the existing spatial relations of poorer, blacker inner cities, and affluent white suburbs.

The significance of the Gautreaux program goes beyond the Chicago suburbs, as the central objective of voucher-based relocation found its way into federal policy. In 1993, based on the results of the Gautreaux program and with input into the legislation from Alexander Polikoff, Congress authorized Moving to Opportunity (MTO), a federal experiment modeled after the Gautreaux program and designed to evaluate the effects of geographic mobility on poverty. The program operated in five cities—Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Boston, and Baltimore—and included 4,600 families; those in the “experimental” group were required to use Section 8 vouchers to relocate to low-poverty neighborhoods and received assistance from a local nonprofit agency. ⁷⁷ The MTO experiment reflected a new policy consensus among a coalition of academic researchers, policy makers, and government planners: neighborhood was the most important variable in allowing the poor to overcome alleged underclass behavior and improve life chances. Unlike the Gautreaux program, MTO was based strictly on income, rather than race, a political calculation in an era of neglect and even hostility toward integration under the Reagan and Bush, Sr. administrations. ⁷⁸

Because of its reliance on existing and privately owned housing, MTO was bound by the same historical and structural limitations as the Gautreaux program. Having access to a voucher did not automatically create access to a “better” neighborhood. Experimental group movers had to locate housing in low-poverty areas that fell below FMRs while negotiating landlords’ expectations of their behavior. As a result, only half of the households in this group were able to relocate, and many of these families quickly moved back to high-poverty, and often racially segregated, neighborhoods. ⁷⁹ A recent ten-year study of the program found that, although MTO did provide positive results for a number of households, its capacity for economic and racial deconcentration was undermined by a crisis of affordable housing, particularly in “healthy” low-poverty neighborhoods. The reality is that vouchers themselves do not increase the housing supply, and their effectiveness decreases as vacancy rates fall. This diminishing supply of affordable shelter is especially critical as public housing authorities continue to demolish conventional public housing projects, “vouchering out” poor families into the private market where, competing with “market-rate” tenants, they frequently trade one poor, majority-black neighborhood for another, even facing increased risks of homelessness. The demolition of projects built and operated on a racialized basis has reproduced segregation outside of public housing, representing an ironic legacy of the civil rights litigation begun in 1966. ⁸⁰