Moving to Integration? The Origins of Chicago’s Gautreaux Program and the Limits of Voucher-Based Housing Mobility

Abstract

This article explores the origins and implementation of Chicago’s Gautreaux Assisted Housing Program, which used federal vouchers to move poor African American families to majority-white neighborhoods in the Chicago suburbs between 1976 and 1997. The program grew out of discrimination lawsuits by public housing tenants against the Chicago Housing Authority and Department of Housing and Urban Development. The plaintiffs originally sought the construction of new suburban public housing, but changes in federal policy, including the creation of vouchers, and shifts in civil rights jurisprudence confined them to the use of privately owned, existing housing. As a result, the remedy for state-sponsored segregation sent poor black families into a historically segregated housing market that remained largely unaltered by civil rights legislation. In addition, the program’s use of tenant screening and counseling services transformed the litigation from an attempt to reorganize metropolitan housing markets into a program of uplift and racial pioneering in white neighborhoods. This article underscores the ways in which market-based solutions, and the unspoken resistance to integration they sometimes fostered, are important to understanding not only the fate of the Gautreaux program but also the obstacles to civil rights litigation and suburban integration that emerged in the 1970s and beyond.