Residential Attainment of Now-Adult Gautreaux Children: Do they Gain, Hold or Lose Ground in Neighborhood Ethnic and Economic Segregation?

Abstract

This paper examines the extent to which Chicago's Gautreaux residential mobility program affected children's residential attainment. Low-income black families voluntarily relocated into mostly white or mostly black city and suburban neighborhoods. The paper integrates quantitative and qualitative data collected eight to 22 years after participants' initial move into their placement neighborhoods. The primary programmatic goal of desegregation was accomplished; now-adult children's origin, placement and current neighborhoods average 85.6, 29.9 and 44.5 per cent black residents respectively. Now-adult children's residential mobility decisions have located them, on average, in ethnically integrated, low-poverty neighborhoods; children placed in mostly black, high-poverty neighborhoods and those placed in mostly white, low-poverty neighborhoods have relocated to ethnically balanced low- to moderate-poverty neighborhoods. Suburban placement was key in determining the level of children's initial relocation and current neighborhood quality. Now-adult children currently residing in suburban cities live in higher quality neighborhoods compared to those currently residing in Chicago.

Keywords:

• Housing policy
• residential mobility
• Gautreaux

Notes

¹ The Leadership Council was founded as the result of a campaign for open housing led by Dr Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1966. The Leadership Council's mission was to eliminate discrimination and segregation in metropolitan Chicago housing markets.

² When the Gautreaux court ruling was finalized in 1981, it included a provision to allow up to one-third of participants to move to census tracts with more than 30 per cent black residents as long as they could demonstrate that it was a ‘revitalizing community’. A neighborhood is considered ‘revitalizing’ if there is enough development activity underway or planned so that economic integration is likely in the short run and ethnic integration might follow in the long run. Therefore, despite the program's desegregation goal, a significant proportion of Gautreaux participants were placed in predominantly black neighborhoods.

³ The Gautreaux program included three selection criteria: specifically, not admitting families with more than four children, large debts or unacceptable housekeeping (Rosenbaum, 1994). All three criteria reduced the eligible pool by less than 30 per cent.

⁴ Housing counselors notified families as apartments became available, counseled them about the advantages and disadvantages of these moves, and took them to visit the units and communities. Counselors offered units based on participants' order of enrollment into the program. Very few clients refused an offer because of the high quality of the units, and the knowledge that they were unlikely to get another offer due to the large number of families on the wait-list (Popkin et al., 1993).

⁵ The effective take-up rate would be based on the percentage of enrolled families that were also offered a housing voucher or certificate that were able to lease a unit.

⁶ Compared with families currently living in Chicago's distressed public housing developments, Gautreaux families are demographically somewhat more advantaged (Popkin & Cunningham, 2001).

⁷ Involuntary relocation is mobility into private market housing due to public housing redevelopment, coupled with substantial time pressures and minimal mobility counseling. Under most current public housing redevelopment plans, fewer units are rebuilt and many residents will not meet the eligibility criteria for return (Goetz, 2002; Popkin & Cunningham, 2005).

⁸ Beginning in the 1990s, families were also given the opportunity to search for their own units. By 1990 the rental market was strong enough to allow the Leadership Council to eliminate its real-estate staff. Given this, and the fact that beginning in the 1990s housing choices offered to participating families were limited to only suburban addresses, these analyses are confined to families moving between 1976 and 1989 (Rubinowitz & Rosenbaum, 2001).

⁹ Although it would have been ideal to interview now-adult children directly, this was not attempted because many Gautreaux mothers did not discuss participation in the Gautreaux program with their children. Only interviewing children whose mothers first gave approval would have led to a biased sample.

¹⁰ An index of neighborhood disadvantage based on mother's current address, crime and poverty was used to select the 25 respondents interviewed. The 25 respondents had an index of disadvantage that ranged from two to eight, representing almost the full range of the index of current neighborhood disadvantage. At the low end, respondents' current neighborhoods ranged from a high of 32 per cent poor, and at the high end respondents' current neighborhoods ranged from a low of 2 per cent poor.

¹¹ Thompson (2007) reported that public housing families reside in assisted housing for an average of 7.5 years, and multiple program participants, who moved between public housing and housing voucher programs, resided in assisted housing for an average of 6.3 years.

¹² It is important to remind readers that Gautreaux families relocated because of the ‘pull’ of potential destination neighborhoods. Current public housing residents in developments undergoing substantial redevelopment are relocating because of the ‘push’ of public housing authorities.