From the Archives: 1966 – Gautreaux v. Chicago Housing Authority

Public housing in Chicago has a long and complicated history that has had a lasting impact on federal housing policy nationwide. In 1942, the first public housing complex was considered a model of successful development. However, over the next two decades, public housing in Chicago transitioned to a national symbol of poverty, segregation and failed housing policy.  

Efforts to combat racial segregation in Chicago public housing were pioneered by the first Executive Director of the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA), Elizabeth Wood. She fought tirelessly to integrate public housing by building high-quality homes for Black Chicagoans in majority-white neighborhoods. She was a committed proponent for building small housing projects dispersed in racially and economically diverse neighborhoods instead of high-rises concentrated in low-income, majority-Black areas. From 1937 to 1954, she oversaw the construction of homes for more than 60,000 people, many of whom lived in developments like the Cabrini-Green and Ida B. Wells Homes. But despite this success, she resigned from the CHA in 1953 after many of her colleagues and city aldermen repeatedly opposed her efforts to build integrated housing units throughout the city. She was replaced by leaders who abandoned her plans to integrate public housing and located new developments exclusively in low-income Black communities.   

In 1966, only 63 of the over 10,000 public housing units constructed by the CHA were outside low-income Black neighborhoods. Dorothy Gautreaux, a community leader and resident of the public housing project Altgeld Gardens, decided to take a stand and hold the CHA responsible for perpetuating racial segregation in violating the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) guidelines and the Fourteenth Amendment. Backed by the ACLU, the plaintiffs alleged that by building public housing projects only in predominantly Black neighborhoods, the CHA segregated Black Chicagoans and inhibited their access to quality community amenities and public institutions available to white Chicagoans.

The landmark civil rights lawsuit would make its way to the Supreme Court and would change the face of public housing in Chicago. The CHA was banned from building new public housing in only predominantly Black communities unless they built as many in racially diverse areas and from building dense concentrations of housing in any one neighborhood. Additionally, it also established the Gautreaux Assisted Housing Program. Named after Dorothy Gautreaux, the program was the nation’s first “housing mobility program.” Its purpose was to remedy past segregation by offering Black residents of CHA public housing the opportunity to find housing in racially and economically diverse communities. The program distributed Section 8 housing vouchers to more than 7,000 Black families offered placement in desegregated city or suburban neighborhoods. 

The Gautreaux Assisted Housing Program was run by the Leadership Council for Metropolitan Open Communities, backed by $3 million in grants from the Trust. The program ended in 1998 after placing 7,100 families, mostly in affluent, majority-white suburbs. Studies showed that overall, families were satisfied with the program. It has become a model for similar programs in cities across the country, including the Moving to Opportunity demonstration in Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York City.   

The Gautreaux case is a landmark example of legal advocacy creating more equitable policies that address the social and economic consequences of lack of access to opportunity by exposing the role that discriminatory housing policies played in racial segregation. Today, the Trust continues this work by advancing multiple efforts to reform public housing authority homeownership programs that have the potential to unlock long-term wealth building opportunities for Black and Latine individuals and repair past harms caused to communities of color by inequitable federal and local housing policy.  

In 2019, the Trust supported a coordinated effort to evaluate the efficacy of one housing mobility program with a grant to the 2Gen Economic Mobility Demonstration. 2Gen seeks to answer whether providing services to families who are participating in the federal Housing Voucher Program after they have moved will substantially improve their health, financial security, educational opportunities, or economic well-being. It aims to inform program design and catalyze national policy reforms to federal housing programs by demonstrating that services help participating low-income families, who are primarily families of color, achieve economic mobility. Further, the study seeks to demonstrate that providing these types of support to current housing voucher families will inevitably lead to stabilizing the next generation of the family.  

The Trust has also funded the Chicago Area Fair Housing Alliance (CAFHA) to advocate on behalf of voucher holders for reforms to the Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) Homeownership Program. In 2021, CAFHA created a coalition to conduct research evaluating the program’s efficacy with support from the Trust and Connecting Capital and Community (3C), a Trust initiative aiming to build Black and Latine homeownership. With Trust funding, CAFHA promoted recommendations outlined in the resulting report by advocating for policy and programmatic changes to the HCV Homeownership Program among public housing authorities, HUD, and the lending and real estate industry. The Trust also funded and partnered with Housing Choice Partners to implement the report’s recommendations and advocate for changes to public housing authority homeownership programs that meet the needs of voucher holders. This work is a critical step towards undoing the damage caused by decades of inequitable federal and local housing policy.