"At night you had to put your mattress on the floor because bullets would be coming through the windows. It was like Vietnam."

The speaker is Lenore Sowell, a single black mother and former public housing resident. Sowell heads one of the 4,000 "pioneer" families who relocated to better housing in the white suburbs under Chicago's court-ordered Gautreaux housing relocation program. This widely watched mobility program began in 1976 and ended in 1998 when the last of the families moved.

James Rosenbaum	Leonard Rubinowitz

Two decades of research on the fate of these families is described by IPR faculty Leonard Rubinowitz and James Rosenbaum in their new book, Crossing the Class and Color Lines, published in May by the University of Chicago Press. The book also offers a history and analysis of federal and local public housing policy.

Based on surveys and interviews, the researchers compared the social, educational, and economic experiences of families who moved to the suburbs with a control group who relocated to predominantly black areas within the city. They found suburban youth were significantly more likely to be in school or working, in college track classes, in four-year colleges, and employed in jobs with higher pay and better benefits.

Education. The impact of the suburban move on educational outcomes presents a complex picture. Mothers reported that schools were safer, class sizes smaller, standards much higher, and dropout levels lower. For youth past the age of 17, 40% of the suburban sample was enrolled in a college track vs. 24% in the city. Similarly, 54% of the suburban youth were enrolled in college and 27% in four-year colleges vs. 21% in college and 4% in four-year institutions for the city movers.

A seven-year follow-up study found that city and suburban children continued to receive similar grades, despite the higher suburban standards they had to meet.

The relocated suburban children were placed in special education classes at a much higher rate than in the city (19% vs 7% of city children). "The great disparity between city and suburban schools revealed glaring inadequacies of prior education," the authors write. Yet some suburban parents felt their children were victims of discrimination by teachers.

Social Integration. The social integration of black families into their new nearly all-white communities was also complex. Most reported more interactions with neighbors than the city movers, but also less friendliness and more negative interactions. Especially in the earlier days of their settlement, they recounted incidents of racial harassment and violence, as well as discrimination by store clerks and white parents who refused to let the black children play or stay in their homes. These declined over time and social acceptance increased.

Despite some ugly incidents of violence, the families said their primary reason for moving (along with help with the rent) was safety. They said it offered them freedom from fear of crime and relief from gang activity. Seventy percent of those who moved before 1990 were still in the suburbs in 1997.

Economic Outcomes. Of the mothers who moved to the suburbs, 75% were working compared to 41% of those who moved within the city. And more of the suburban women reported at least one job benefit, such as vacation.

Based on these positive outcomes, the authors believe there is "a geography of opportunity" for families who have been mired in substandard inner-city public housing. They cite numerous housing mobility programs that have followed in the wake of Gautreaux. Yet these programs still face some major hurdles. Among them:

• People who cannot or do not want to move. Only about 20% of eligible families who enrolled in the Gautreaux program each year used Section 8 certificates and moved.
  
  
• The supply of affordable housing in the private market for the poorest families is shrinking and there continues to be a shortage of large family units. Enlisting landlords is one of the major challenges facing mobility programs. Another is com-munity resistance, which played a large part in the failure of Chicago's earlier scattered site housing program.
  
  
• Need for continued funding for tenant-based housing assistance. Growth in the number of households receiving rental assistance has declined dramatically, from an average of 224,000 in 1978-1982 to about 146,000 in the early 1990s.