MEDIA CONTACT: Wendy Leopold at 847-491-4890 or w-leopold@northwestern.edu

June 29, 2004

Study Says CHA Reforms Are Ineffective

EVANSTON, Ill. --- A recent Northwestern University study has found that Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) residents who relocate from public housing overwhelmingly move to areas that are nearly as poor and segregated. This is despite initiatives to get residents to move to city or suburban areas with lower poverty rates and lower minority population.

"Efforts by the federal government and courts to change patterns of racial and economic segregation including HOPE VI and Gautreaux do not appear successful. Instead we are seeing the resegregation of poor black families in poor black neighborhoods,” said Dan A. Lewis, professor of education and social policy at Northwestern University and faculty fellow at the University's Institute for Policy Research

The report compared a sample of public housing residents to a similar group of poor black families not living in public housing. More than 90 percent of the public housing movers wound up in poor black urban communities instead of moving to mixed-income communities.

"Most of these families end up on the south and west sides, perpetuating economic and racial segregation in the city and suburbs," said Lewis. Lewis is co-author of the report titled "The Plan for Transformation and the Residential Movements of Public Housing Residents" with Cheryl A. Ward, also with Northwestern's Institute for Policy Research.

In particular, the report looks at the mobility patterns of public housing families, which seem to be determined by forces beyond conventional counseling by the CHA. It concludes that the programs designed to encourage public housing families and families with Housing Choice Vouchers to move to "opportunity areas" -- areas with relatively lower poverty rates -- are a weak intervention for changing patterns of economic and ethnic segregation.

“These interventions neither coerce movers to shift their preferences or force communities to be more receptive to providing housing for low-income African Americans,” said Lewis. “Whether they live in public housing or not, few families will move outside of poor areas with high densities of African Americans as long as resources are scarce and discrimination is prevalent.”

"Our research not only makes it clear that factors that determine moves are not wholly addressed by mobility initiatives," said Lewis. “It suggests that moving relatively few poor families out of poverty-stricken areas is a high-cost/low-benefit strategy that shifts attention from the thousands of families living in the 'Black Metropolis.'"

To download a copy of the full report, go to the Institute for Policy Research Web site at http://www.northwestern.edu/ipr/people/lewispapers.html.