Gautreaux Program

The Gautreaux program is the result of a 1976 Supreme Court consent decree in a lawsuit on behalf of African American public housing residents, which charged the Chicago Housing Authority and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development with intentional segregation (HUD) (HUD v. Gautreaux, 425 U.S. 284, 1976). The program allows public housing residents (and those on the waiting list) to receive Section 8 housing certificates and move to private apartments in either the city of Chicago or its mostly White suburbs. The program provides extensive housing services to find landlords willing to participate and to counsel families about these moves.

Between 1976 and 1998, over 7,000 families participated, and over half moved to middle-income White suburbs. The program gives participants rent subsidies to live in private apartments for the same cost as public housing. Participants may choose to move to a wide variety of over 115 suburbs throughout the six counties surrounding Chicago. Because integration was the program's primary goal, suburbs with fewer than 70% Whites were excluded from the program, and very high income suburbs were excluded by Section 8 funding limitations. Yet these constraints eliminate few suburbs. The receiving suburbs ranged from working class to upper-middle class and were located within 30 to 90 minutes of driving time from the participants’ former addresses. To provide mutual support, the program tries to move two to three families to each neighborhood but avoids moving many families to any one neighborhood. The program has succeeded in this goal, and as a result, maintains low visibility and low impact on receiving communities.

The program has three selection criteria: Families must have no more than four children, no large debts, and acceptable housekeeping standards and behaviors. With these criteria, program designers sought to avoid overcrowding, missed rent [Page 240]payments, and building damage. But none of these criteria was extremely selective, and all three criteria combined reduced the eligible pool by less than 30%. Although these selection criteria make this an above-average group compared with housing project residents, they are not “highly creamed,” and all are very low income. The program's procedures create a quasi-experimental design. Although all participants come from the same low-income African American city neighborhoods (usually public housing projects), some move to middle-income White suburbs, whereas others move to low-income African American urban neighborhoods. In principle, participants have choices about where they move, but in actual practice, participants are assigned to city or suburb locations in a quasi-random manner. Apartment availability is unrelated to client interest; it is determined by housing agents who do not deal with clients. As units become available, they are offered to clients according to their waiting list position regardless of their location preference. Although clients can refuse an offer, few do because they are unlikely to get another. As a result, participants’ preferences for the city or the suburbs have little to do with where they move. As a program that moved thousands of low-income families in quasi-random fashion to a wide diversity of suburban and city neighborhoods, it provides a unique opportunity to understand the effects of neighborhoods on residents.

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