Twenty-five years ago U.S. District Judge Richard Austin struck what seemed like a mighty blow against segregation. Ruling in the case Dorothy Gautreaux et al. v. the Chicago Housing Authority, he ordered the CHA to build 700 public-housing apartments on scattered sites in predominantly white neighborhoods.
They do have a point. After a generation of stalling, new public housing is being built, and Chicago is sometimes even talked of as a national model. The new stuff doesn’t look like the stereotype of public housing. It’s being planned, designed, located, and managed by private outfits with more energy and organization than the CHA has shown in generations. (See sidebars.)
The postwar white riots didn’t alter Wood’s commitment to integration, but they nonetheless led directly to today’s high-rise ghettos. First, in 1947 and 1949, the state legislature gave city aldermen veto power over where CHA could build. (Housing authorities are technically state agencies; Chicago’s was the only one in Illinois placed under aldermanic veto.) Then in 1954–after she had taken to describing the CHA as an agency in “captivity”–Wood herself was ousted in a transparent exercise of clout.
Gautreaux language doesn’t include such imprecise terms as “ghetto,” though. In court documents, census tracts over 30 percent black are called the “Limited Area” and the rest of the city is the “General Area.” The actual boundaries between the two shift every ten years when a new census comes out. What doesn’t shift is the implied black-and-white view of the city. Gautreaux takes no official notice of Chicago’s increasingly multicultural population; in the census Judge Austin had to work with, 97 percent of the city’s nonwhites were black. His precise legal language has been overtaken by events, as has the assumption (easier to make in 1966 than now) that everyone in the CHA wants to live in integrated neighborhoods.
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In 1981 Polikoff’s plaintiffs won again. HUD agreed to atone for its part in high-rise segregation: it would set aside money, year by year, until it had helped 7,100 CHA families move out of the Limited Area. HUD’s set-aside money has gone both to scattered-site construction and to a Section 8 rent-certificate program. Arguably the certificate program has worked better than scattered sites. Run by the Leadership Council for Metropolitan Open Communities and known as the “Gautreaux program,” to date it has helped more than 5,500 CHA families move, most of them to the suburbs.
