Despite the strategy’s success in Chicago, nationally there are few programs today that focus on helping African American families move from racially segregated, high-poverty neighborhoods to areas where their children will have access to good schools and less exposure to crime. Those that do exist are all results of lawsuits.
One in Baltimore seeks to move 4,400 families to better areas by 2018. Another, in Dallas, exists as a result of a lawsuit filed in 1985. And on Thursday, a Chicago judge approved a Gautreaux-related settlement that — among other things — will allow a new host of families to be relocated, with the help of a counselor, to low-poverty, higher-opportunity neighborhoods.
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Programs like these are small compared with the scale of the problem: Cities are still extremely segregated.
In Chicago, African Americans tend to live in areas where the riots of the 1960s took place, areas that are almost entirely African American today. There are still municipalities in the greater Chicago area with less than 1% African American population, according to a Fair Housing and Equity Assessment from 2013. There are no municipalities where Hispanics make up more than 90% of the population, something that’s not true for African Americans, the report says.
The continued segregation, despite decades of anti-poverty programs, raises a question: Should housing authorities be making a more conscious effort to help people who live in segregated, low-income neighborhoods move to wealthier, more diverse areas?
Alex Polikoff, one of the attorneys who filed the Gautreaux case in 1966, says it’s a no-brainer. He continues to work on legislation related to Gautreaux and is behind Thursday’s agreement, which will require Chicago to move about 200 families in a Gautreaux-type program.
“We know so much about the harm of young kids growing up in severely-distressed neighborhoods. If we have a way to enable kids to escape to better life opportunities, it’s immoral not to do that,” he said.
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It was while downing pizza on his birthday in January of 1966 that Polikoff was first presented with the idea that the way the Chicago Housing Authority was building new public housing violated the Constitution.
He was a volunteer attorney for the ACLU at the time, and over lunch a friend from the Urban League told him about complaints from a coalition of black organizations that the housing authority was only building new housing projects in black neighborhoods, he recounts in his book, Waiting for Gautreaux. The selection of public-housing sites was politically motivated: The housing authority couldn’t buy land in white neighborhoods without the city council’s approval. But keeping black people in black neighborhoods violated the equal-protection clause of the Constitution, Polikoff argued, and that argument formed the basis for the lawsuit he filed in August of 1966.
In 1969, a federal judge in Chicago issued an order preventing the housing authority from constructing new public housing in predominantly African American neighborhoods unless it also built public housing elsewhere. It also prohibited the city from constructing dense concentrations of public housing.
Not satisfied with this settlement, Polikoff argued that the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) should be required to remedy its past errors, and in 1976, the Supreme Court agreed, ruling that the government could be required to use the entire region to do so. A consent decree led to HUD agreeing to fund a voucher program to move black families to the suburbs.
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Nine housing authorities now participate in a regional pool of resources that began more than a decade ago. They include authorities in counties such as DuPage, Lake, and McHenry, using the money to build nearly 30 mixed-income developments in “opportunity areas” that are near transit and job opportunities.
“Just getting rental housing into some of these communities was hard to do for many years,” said Snyderman said.
A pilot program launched in 2011, the Chicago Region Housing Choice Initiative (CRHCI), encourages families to use vouchers to move to some of these locations, giving them counseling to help them do so.
Regional authorities and mayors have “adopted new tools for promoting inclusion and diversity, building on the lessons learned from Gautreaux,” she said. “I feel more hopeful that the historic segregation in the Chicago region can be transformed — because it’s now not all on the shoulders of the public housing authority,” she said.
Still, for Alex Polikoff and some other advocates, the progress that’s been made in the past century is not enough. He understands why mobility programs aren’t politically viable. After all, using a more expensive voucher to help one family move to the suburbs might mean that fewer families get off the very-long waiting lists for housing assistance. And wealthy neighborhoods often don’t want low-income families moving in through government programs.
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But Polikoff strongly believes that housing authorities should make more effort to help some families move far away from the segregated inner city to suburbs where their lives will change, much in the way the lives of the original Gautreaux families changed decades ago. After all, voucher programs that allow residents to go to the private market haven’t been effective in desegregating neighborhoods.
He’s still battling the Chicago Housing Authority on the issue. The Thursday ruling made official a settlement between Polikoff’s firm and the Chicago Housing Authority, allowing the city to extensively rehab Altgeld Gardens, the housing complex where Harris once lived. But in addition to the rehab, Polikoff extracted a promise from the city that it would also issue 218 vouchers to families with children on the CHA waiting list, enabling them to move to designated “Opportunity Areas” and receive pre and post-move counseling.
It’s not just Chicago — Polikoff has proposed a “national” Gautreaux program, making 50,000 housing-choice vouchers available to black families who live in segregated areas, which could be used only in census tracts with less than 10% poverty and fewer minorities. The number of families would be limited, to avoid “threatening” a receiving community, he wrote in a proposal in 2004 (Polikoff told me he still supports this proposal).
I asked Polikoff if this policy could be seen as “reparations” of sort. Not reparations, he said. But an apology to the African American community for centuries of discrimination.
“In a sense it’s a very small part of playing makeup here,” he said. “We owe it to them to remedy the discrimination of the past, among many other things we owe them.”
This article originally appeared on The Next Economy, a joint project of The Atlantic and National Journal.
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