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Gautreaux
at 40 conference: The legacy and future of landmark public housing
decisions |
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Forty years ago, Dorothy Gautreaux and three other public housing residents filed two class-action lawsuits in Chicago, one of which would make its way to the Supreme Court. The Court’s unanimous Hills v. Gautreaux decision resulted in a 1976 settlement that set in motion an attempt to end decades of racially discriminatory practices in Chicago public housing—and eventually the nation.
Thanks to the Gautreaux program that grew out of the settlement,
more than 6,000 poor, black Chicago families moved out of their
blighted, inner-city housing projects into low-poverty, mostly white
suburban neighborhoods. Faculty from Northwestern’s Institute
for Policy Research (IPR) were among the first to measure and document
the successes and failures of residential mobility programs since
the 1976 launch of Gautreaux. The conference “Gautreaux at
40: Race, Class, Housing Mobility, and Neighborhood Revitalization,”
organized by Leonard
S. Rubinowitz, law, brought together on March 3 more than 400
academics, activists, developers, officials, and public housing
residents to discuss and debate the legacy and ongoing impact of
these landmark decisions. The School of Law and IPR cosponsored
the conference. In tracing the public housing issue from 1966, when
it was joined in the courts and the streets through Martin Luther
King, Jr.’s march in Chicago for open housing, Rubinowitz
marveled, “Who could have imagined that 40 years later several
hundred of us would gather to discuss and debate these issues that
seem to have no end.” IPR
faculty studies on Gautreaux Rubinowitz and Rosenbaum also documented a truly unusual circumstance—moving poor black families into predominantly middle-class white suburbs. They recounted the Gautreaux pioneers’ complex experiences resulting from racism and harrassment to improved life outcomes in their book Crossing the Class and Color Lines: From Public Housing to White Suburbs (University of Chicago Press, 2000). Currently, Greg Duncan,
human development and social policy, is leading an evaluation of
Gautreaux II families. This second-wave study will provide important
qualitative data that could not be gathered from the original Gautreaux
research due to limitations in the original program’s design.
Gautreaux’s
legacy: What have we learned? Duncan found that 15 years after Gautreaux I’s implementation, 67 percent of the mothers placed in the suburbs were still residing in the suburbs. Neighborhood poverty rates were as low as they had been in their placement neighborhoods. More important, children who moved with their mothers and had since become adults were nearly as likely as their mothers to live in the suburbs and in low-poverty neighborhoods. Duncan called it a true story of “intergenerational success.” Earlier studies by Rosenbaum and others showed that children’s attitudes toward school improved and their grades did not drop if they were placed in suburban rather than city neighborhoods. These studies also found the children were more likely to graduate high school, enter college, and enroll in better colleges (four-year versus two-year colleges). They were also more likely to get jobs and to be employed at higher paying jobs. Unfortunately, preliminary results for Gautreaux II families, who moved between 2002 and 2003, have not been as promising. Families who moved a second time ended up in neighborhoods with higher rates of poverty and percentages of African Americans than Gautreaux I families. These moves seem to be undoing the benefits of the initial move in Gautreaux II, Duncan noted, but the jury is still out on the longer term fortunes of these families.
In between Gautreaux I and II came MTO. Buoyed by Rosenbaum’s Gautreaux documentation and seeking more complete answers to the public housing puzzle, HUD implemented the MTO program in five cities—Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York—between 1994 and 1998. MTO was designed to fill a research gap in the Gautreaux I program—the absence of control groups. Thus, MTO was a random-assignment program that studied two major groups: a treatment group offered assistance to move to more affluent neighborhoods and a control group that was not offered such assistance. The MTO mandated destination neighborhoods with poverty rates of 10 percent or less, while Gautreaux I only targeted race and Gautreaux II set criteria for both race and poverty. According to Duncan, MTO’s most striking success has been a sharp improvement in the mental health of the mothers who moved, with cases of depression being cut in half. Mothers cited getting away from gang- and drug ridden neighborhoods as their number one reason for moving. However, evaluators found that although children of MTO participants attended somewhat higher-achieving schools, these were still under performing schools, scoring below state achievement levels. Participants also did not experience higher employment, nor less welfare receipt when compared with the control group—though the late 1990s was a time when the control group doubled its employment rate, posing a high standard for the treatment group to exceed. Rosenbaum explained this might also be due to the fact that when MTO families changed neighborhoods, most of the moves were less than 10 miles away—compared with an average of 25miles for the Gautreaux participants. This permitted MTO families to move to highly segregated neighborhoods and even allowed their children to remain in the same schools.
Susan J. Popkin (PhD, Northwestern University) of the Urban Institute, a former IPR research associate, underlined the urgent need for a dedicated effort to house the remaining “hard-to house” families. She spoke about “war-zone” conditions that have damaged some residents to the point where they cannot function in a normal community. “We owe these families, especially the children, a serious effort to try to stabilize their situations and help them to move to better, safer neighborhoods,” she said. Duncan proposed that residential mobility programs should be examined in the wider context of programs that might help low-income families. He gave the example of Milwaukee’s successful New Hope work-support program. New Hope offers a cafeteria-style program of benefits, including child-care and income supports, providing the working poor with the same opportunity as the middleclass to balance the demands of work and family, Duncan said.
Perhaps the most radical proposal for “dismantling the black ghetto” came from Alexander Polikoff, lead counsel in the Gautreaux lawsuits. He presented his idea for a national Gautreaux program under which a portion of existing housing vouchers would be “recycled” and offered to 50,000 black families each year. Polikoff explained why he thought such a program would be fiscally and programmatically feasible and, in a decade, would enable half of the resident black families to leave their ghettos. Polikoff believes this would trigger redevelopment that would end black ghettos as we know them. The public housing debate has gained new strength and relevance in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. But it involves a complex set of issues, actors, and competing interests, compounded by too little understanding of what public housing residents want themselves. While some evidence indicates that by moving, such residents can do better, the conference also showed that poorly designed interventions and insufficient resources mean they can also do the same or worse. A group of public housing residents who attended the conference made it perfectly clear that they are not happy about being forced to leave their communities and social networks behind. “These are our homes you are talking about,” one argued. For a complete bibliography of Gautreaux research by IPR faculty,
please go to
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