Gautreaux decision

The Gautreaux decision was a 1976 U.S. Supreme Court consent decree that followed a judicial finding of illegal racial discrimination and segregation in public housing in the city of Chicago. This court order was the result of a suit filed in 1966 by Dorothy Gautreaux [Page 525]against the Chicago Housing Authority and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) claiming that they had intentionally selected locations for public housing in poor, racially segregated neighborhoods—the first suit alleging racial discrimination in public housing. In Hills v. Gautreaux, the Supreme Court ruled that a remedy extending beyond the city limits of Chicago was permissible because HUD had violated the Constitution and federal laws. This case is important sociologically because, in effect, it resulted in a quasi-social experiment that demonstrated the benefits of moving from an inner-city environment marked by racial segregation and concentrated poverty to suburban locations where employment opportunities and educational quality are significantly better.

The court order required that African Americans in Chicago public housing be offered opportunities to live in private apartments with housing subsidies. Between 1976 and 1998, approximately 7,000 households relocated as a result of the Gautreaux decision. Some of the beneficiaries of this court order moved to private apartments in the city of Chicago, whereas others moved to private apartments in the suburbs. The opportunity to move to the suburbs was part of a desegregation remedy that provided rent subsidies to African American families moving to areas within the six-county Chicago metropolitan area that were less than 30% African American. The experiences of these households were studied by James E. Rosenbaum and his colleagues at Northwestern University. These researchers found that, in general, those who moved to the suburban locations fared better in terms of both employment and education. Because the households who relocated elsewhere in the city and those who relocated to the suburbs were otherwise similar in most regards—both groups were public housing residents with similarly low levels of income and education—the differences in outcomes between those who relocated elsewhere in the city and those who moved to the suburbs can be attributed primarily to where they moved. Thus, the study showed that location matters in terms of employment and education outcomes.

With regard to employment, the Gautreaux research provides important support for the spatial mismatch hypothesis, which holds that an important reason for high African American unemployment is the disproportionate concentration of African Americans in central cities given that most new job opportunities over the past several decades have been in the suburbs. The

Gautreaux results show that how close African Americans are to job opportunities geographically affects their employment rates, as predicted by the mismatch hypothesis. Overall, nearly two-thirds of those who relocated to the suburbs were employed after their moves, compared with just half of those who relocated within the city. The effects were most dramatic among the hard-core unemployed—those who had never been employed. Nearly half of those in this group (46%) were employed after moving to the suburbs, compared with just 30% of those who relocated within the city.

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