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

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

The Chicago Housing Authority made a series of impressive legal arguments in its defense, but its commonsense argument was the best: public housing should not be forced on a resisting community. The judge laughed that out of court, and ruled in favor of Gautreaux and company. He ordered that no new public housing be built in areas more than 30 per cent black until 1,450 units had been installed in white neighborhoods.

In 1969, when the court order was announced, race relations were not exactly at an all-time high. Civil-rights marches through the West Side had led to riots, and gang activity was on the rise. Daley went to war against Austin's order--with the support of blacks who wanted more public housing and whites angry that the neighborhoods they worked hard to afford were now to be occupied by people on welfare.

In an ironic twist, HUD had just earmarked $26 million in Model Cities money for Chicago. Daley cheered HUD for rescuing the city from Austin, while the judge opposed HUD on grounds that the money violated his order. After a protracted battle, the judge partially relented.

In his new ruling, he claimed sarcastically that "It is an anomaly that this 'law and order' chief executive of this city should challenge and defy federal law," i.e., Austin's own ruling. "Apparently 'law and order' applies only to the enforcement of state law and municipal ordinances." Austin gave "the chief executive and his City Council an opportunity to repent and reconsider their conduct" by reducing from 1,450 to 700 the number of units to be built in white areas before the city could get the Model Cities money.

The final chapter was the 1976 Supreme Court decision Hills v. Gautreaux, which granted what Polikoff had long sought: forced integration, funded by the public, and administered by Washington at the behest of local leftists.

The Polikoff plan was called the "Gautreaux Demonstration Program," and, using HUD Section 8 certificates, it moved several thousand inner-city residents to the suburbs over the objections of virtually every group in Chicago, including black community leaders.

The main result of the program was "white flight." By the end of the 1970s, more than 700,000 whites had moved out of Chicago. Yet Elizabeth Warren's highly regarded study on Gautreaux declares the policy a complete success. Of the resulting turmoil, she says, "one cannot help but be distressed to see such a result from such a sincere effort to promote racial justice."

Racial Micromanagement

IN HOUSING literature, social engineering is not a metaphor but a policy. Academics use the "Index of Dissimilarity," which compares racial concentration in particular Census tracts to that of the entire city. The Index rates a community against an unachievable standard of perfect blending, in much the way that economists use "perfect competition" as an other-worldly policy benchmark for anti-trust and other policies. Most cities rate about 80, on a scale where 100 is total separation.

Even moving blacks to the suburbs does not automatically increase "integration." As Professors Elizabeth Hurtman and Terry Jones note in a 1991 essay: "It is a discouraging development for fair-housing activists who have worked hard to open up the suburbs and find their effort futile as the suburbs become increasingly black." Apart from white flight, there is the fact, as the authors note, that when blacks move into suburban neighborhoods, they tend to seek out areas with other blacks.