Alex Polikoff

Alex Polikoff served as lead counsel on Gautreaux v. Chicago Housing Authority and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), which was among the nation’s first public housing desegregation lawsuits. In 1976, the U.S. Supreme Court, deciding unanimously for the plaintiffs, ordered HUD to remedy its past discriminatory actions through giving public housing residents the opportunity to move throughout the Chicago metropolitan area. The case led both to the creation of “scattered-site” public housing and to the creation of “mobility programs,” which used Section 8 vouchers to move voluntary participants from public housing into areas that were not more than 30 percent African-American. Polikoff spent many years as the Executive Director of Business and Professional People for the Public Interest (BPI) in Chicago and now serves as its senior staff counsel.

The Next American City

For the benefit of our readers who may not be familiar with Gautreaux, can you describe the case briefly? 

Alex Polikoff

Gautreaux is a housing desegregation case begun in 1966--almost 40 years ago--because the Chicago Housing Authority [CHA] was discriminating in the selection of sites, putting virtually all of its projects in black neighborhoods and thereby preventing blacks from moving into white neighborhoods via subsidized housing. After CHA was determined to be guilty, the Court decided on three streams of relief: first, build public housing in white neighborhoods ["scattered-site" housing], a program that has now ended; second, a rent subsidy program to give CHA families living in black ghetto neighborhoods a chance to move into white neighborhoods. That program has also now ended. The third and final stream of relief is still going on: demolishing high-rise projects, replacing them with mixed-income communities, and relocating some of the original residents using Section 8 vouchers (now called Housing Choice vouchers).

TNAC

You were involved with Gautreaux for many years after the initial litigation stage ended. What were the main lessons you drew from the process of implementing the judicial remedy?

AP

The first lesson was that the scattered-site program didn’t work very well--even though it’s the largest in the country, over 2,000 units...I’ve concluded that we as a nation are not going to be able--in the scale that we need--to build publicly-owned housing for poor black and poor Latino people in middle-class white neighborhoods. There are several reasons: one is intense community opposition to publicly-owned subsidized housing going into suburbia, and the second is zoning laws and other land-use control laws that come into play when someone is proposing to build new housing. These two problems are related: intense opposition allows the land-use control laws to be manipulated.

The second lesson is that the rent subsidy program works much much better...Under the Section 8 rent-subsidy program, you don’t have to get land-use law approvals, because you’re using existing housing stock...If we run the program appropriately at the right scale, we could indeed end the black ghetto as we know it over the course of a decade or two, which would be a major achievement.

TNAC

In recent articles, you’ve talked about the potential for a national Gautreaux project--legislation that would take the Gautreaux program to scale by funding a national mobility project to move low-income African Americans out of the ghetto. Why do you think there would not be intense community opposition to such a project?

AP

Under my proposal, the numbers of families moving into any receiving municipalities in any year would be so small that there would be no perceived threat in most cases. I’m proposing a program that would involve no more than about ten families per year moving into any city, town, or village… We have a lot of evidence that mobility programs can operate without significant opposition: the Gautreaux program, which operated in over 100 municipalities without a peep of opposition; four [of the five] “Moving to Opportunity” cities [MTO; mobility programs run by HUD during the Clinton administration and modeled after the Gautreaux project]; and several dozen mobility programs that have operated throughout the country also without [any significant problems]...In the case of the [opposition to the] Baltimore MTO project, unfortunately, it was an election year, and opposition to Baltimore MTO became an election issue. Opposition ended when the election was over...It was an unhappy combination of circumstances.

TNAC

In this current political climate, do you think it is even possible to pass the required legislation for a national Gautreaux project?

AP

No. But as you know, I have a section in my article, acknowledging that but saying that history is full of close calls and surprises. Nixon went to China, the Soviet Union collapsed, etc. We never know when the time is going to be right for major policy changes...My argument is not that we’ll be able to implement my proposal in the context of the Bush administration. I believe the proposal I made ought to undergo searching scrutiny; if I’m right that this is workable and doable, we ought to have it on the shelf, so when the happy day comes, we’ll be able to take it off the shelf and use it.

TNAC

A more general question, reflecting in part on what you said about Gautreaux but also on other court cases throughout the country that have not been nearly as successful as Gautreaux--what kind of potential do you think lawsuits have to solve the problems of segregation in the United States?

AP

I’m not optimistic about litigation as a tool for resolving the black ghetto problem. That’s perhaps an understatement: I’m pretty pessimistic. The Gautreaux case was in some ways quite successful, though in other ways quite unsuccessful. But it was in a different climate, all more favorable to litigation as a social change lever...My proposal does not involve litigation; I envision a Congressional enactment that lays out the program explicitly as compensation for slavery, Jim Crow, and black ghettos; in my view, such a law would pass muster even with today’s Supreme Court if that were the rationale for it.

TNAC

What efforts today (of any type, lawyering or not) do you find most promising in terms of their potential to reduce segregation?

AP

The mobility efforts that are up and running in MTO are useful and important, and the exploration of the consequences for the MTO families are highly desirable and will ultimately be part of the dialogue that I hope is generated around my proposal. The damage control by organizations like PRRAC [Poverty & Race Research Action Council], the National Low Income Housing Coalition, and CBPP [Center on Budget and Policy Priorities] to limit how much Housing Choice vouchers can be gutted [under the current administration]--to keep alive as much of the voucher program, with its portability features, as possible--is an important effort.

I’m also a strong supporter of inclusionary zoning, and I’m optimistic about what’s happening with regard to inclusionary zoning around the country and with affordable housing moving up slightly on the political agenda...[But inclusionary zoning] is not likely to take hold on its own as a major nationwide program because we’ve got all these jurisdictions, thousands and thousands throughout the country, with local land-use control policies that have to be dealt with one by one.

TNAC

What kinds of projects are you working on right now?

AP

Right now, I’m engaged in trying to get my book out; it’s scheduled for publication in November. I’m thinking about what the next book project is going to be. I’ll mention one other issue that’s closely tied to the efforts to end the ghetto: an important part of such redevelopment is the schools. While some attention has been paid to that (the HOPE VI redevelopment next to Georgia Tech really redid the local school in a very effective way), generally speaking, the community revitalization process has not gone hand in hand with school improvement, and that’s a matter that needs to be addressed. Here at BPI, we’re beating the drums for that in Chicago.