The ghost of Gautreaux - Clinton administration plan to mandate housing policy

National Review, March 7, 1994 by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

THE housing policy of a free society ought to be simple: people should be able to live where they want, using their own money and engaging in voluntary market exchanges.

Traditionally, this led to neighborhoods centered on one group or another, whether WASP, Greek, Ukrainian, Italian, black, Chinese, or whatever. This natural pattern, a product of rational choice, makes possible strong communities, centered on extended families as well as churches, schools, and civic organizations.

But the Clinton Administration objects. It wants to place Americans where it wants them to live, at heavy expense to the taxpayer. HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros has promised to end "spatial segregation," which he attributes to racism. Cisneros plans to stir the demographic pot, picking six major cities for a HUD experiment called "Moving to Opportunity." At taxpayer expense, inner-city residents on welfare, guided by non-profit groups under contract to HUD, will be transferred to the suburbs. The government will pay for their move, rent, and electricity, and provide counseling and day care. As a test, it will shift 6,200 households in the next two years at a cost of $234 million.

The idea is to free blacks from the depressing congeries of inner-city troubles.

Reviving Gautreaux

MOVING to Opportunity is based on the Gautreaux Program, Chicago's forced residential integration of the late 1960s and 1970s. For liberals, Gautreaux represented a landmark step toward the government-run ideal.

The 1960s lawsuit that made Gautreaux possible was born of political resentment. Beginning in 1956, and continuing for nearly two decades, Chicago's Mayor Richard Daley enjoyed popular support from the city's wide variety of ethnic groups, including blacks, and he kept crime and taxes low and provided efficient city services. His Cook County Democratic machine also enjoyed a measure of public support--not least because it successfully resisted federal pressure to "integrate" Chicago's settled ethnic and racial communities.

Daley's resistance in a time of rampant social engineering seems like a miracle, but it was a matter of practicality. The machine could usually deliver Illinois's electoral votes to the national Democratic Party. As part of the quid for this quo, the machine had an unusual amount of discretion in the distribution of federal housing money.

However, the machine made a mistake in 1956, at the very outset of Daley's first term as mayor, that would eventually undermine this resistance. The machine's mistake was to maneuver events so that one Richard Austin wound up as the Republican candidate for governor. Unknown to Austin, the machine had no intention of making him governor; it merely needed a respectable opponent to run against the future Democratic governor, as later depositions confirmed. When he lost, the machine awarded Austin a federal judgeship.

Austin was not consoled, however. He believed he should have won because Eisenhower carried even Cook County against the hapless Stevenson. Austin never forgave Daley, and as the judge in the Gautreaux case ten years later, he struck back.

The plaintiffs' lawyer was Alexander Polikoff, a longtime fixture at the ACLU. Perturbed at Daley's refusal to obey federal housing policy, Polikoff decided in 1965 to take the city to court. His first step was to find a client. After a long search, he came up with Dorothy Gautreaux, a married mother who wanted public housing in a white area. In 1953, she had requested an apartment in Dearborn Homes, but got one instead in AltgeldMurray Homes on the far South Side--scarcely, one would have thought, a serious human-rights violation. Nonetheless, Polikoff alleged that his plaintiffs (there were other families as well, all on welfare) had been harmed by Chicago's "racist" housing policy.

What Harm?

FIRST the matter of legal standing had to be dealt with. Did Polikoffs clients gain the right to sue the taxpayers of Chicago solely because they didn't live in a white area? The 1964 Civil Rights Act, the basis of the suit, had been widely understood as forbidding only explicit, racially motivated harm- e.g. the refusal to consider the bid of a qualified buyer, solely on grounds of race.

But, according to Polikoff, it was enough that the "present" circumstances denied his clients "a right to live in a public housing system which is not infected and shaped by a policy of racial discrimination in the location of its facilities." Translation: the mere existence of racial disparities, regardless of economics, was enough. That is now a familiar leap of logic, though at the time it was novel. Austin, pursuing his vendetta, accepted it.

Austin cited a letter from Howard Glickstein, staff director of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, who argued against a narrow interpretation of the 1964 Act. "It is our experience that the most effective way to ensure goals of equal protection is to define the results that must be achieved," he wrote (emphasis in the original). It may have been the earliest official statement of this federal policy.