Like many mothers raising children in Chicago's housing projects in the 1990s and 2000s, Seitia Harris was afraid of the drugs and violence that were pervasive in the neighborhood where she lived, Altgeld Gardens on the city's South Side.
She made sure to provide her three children with every opportunity she could, taking them to ballet lessons, after-school academic programs, plays and activities around the city, encouraging them to work hard at school and stay away from drugs. But the specter of violence and poverty was hard to escape.
Hard to escape, that is, until Harris got an opportunity to move out of the projects to a small village called Alsip, 40 minutes outside of Chicago's city center and 80% white. Harris moved to Alsip 14 years ago and since then has led a quiet, suburban life alongside neighbors who go to work each day and raise their children to go to college.
Harris and her children thrived in Alsip. One of her daughters just graduated from college with a double bachelor's degree in business administration and early childhood education, another is in a bachelor's program for nursing and is a manager at a McDonald's while she attends school. As for her friends who stayed in Altgeld Gardens, Harris told me, "their children have children. My children don't."
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There are hundreds of programs that seek to improve the outcomes of people who live in concentrated poverty. But as Harris and thousands of other mothers like her have demonstrated over the past half century, one of the most effective strategies for lifting families out of poverty is to plunk them down in a completely new neighborhood far away from their past lives.
The program that helped Harris move to Alsip was the result of a lawsuit originally filed in 1966, still being litigated today, referred to as Gautreaux for the original plaintiff, who died in 1968. Among other things, a consent decree related to Gautreaux required the Chicago Housing Authority to provide vouchers for black residents to move to white suburbs beginning in the 1970s. Many of the families who moved to the suburbs stayed there, and their children were more likely to stay out of trouble and go to college than families who stayed within the city.
Despite the strategy's success in Chicago, nationally there are few programs today that focus on helping African American families move from racially segregated, high-poverty neighborhoods to areas where their children will have access to good schools and less exposure to crime. Those that do exist are all results of lawsuits.
One in Baltimore seeks to move 4,400 families to better areas by 2018. Another, in Dallas, exists as a result of a lawsuit filed in 1985. And on Thursday, a Chicago judge approved a Gautreaux-related settlement that -- among other things -- will allow a new host of families to be relocated, with the help of a counselor, to low-poverty, higher-opportunity neighborhoods.
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Programs like these are small compared with the scale of the problem: Cities are still extremely segregated.
In Chicago, African Americans tend to live in areas where the riots of the 1960s took place, areas that are almost entirely African American today. There are still municipalities in the greater Chicago area with less than 1% African American population, according to a Fair Housing and Equity Assessment from 2013. There are no municipalities where Hispanics make up more than 90% of the population, something that's not true for African Americans, the report says.
The continued segregation, despite decades of anti-poverty programs, raises a question: Should housing authorities be making a more conscious effort to help people who live in segregated, low-income neighborhoods move to wealthier, more diverse areas?
Alex Polikoff, one of the attorneys who filed the Gautreaux case in 1966, says it's a no-brainer. He continues to work on legislation related to Gautreaux and is behind Thursday's agreement, which will require Chicago to move about 200 families in a Gautreaux-type program.
"We know so much about the harm of young kids growing up in severely-distressed neighborhoods. If we have a way to enable kids to escape to better life opportunities, it's immoral not to do that," he said.
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It was while downing pizza on his birthday in January of 1966 that Polikoff was first presented with the idea that the way the Chicago Housing Authority was building new public housing violated the Constitution.
He was a volunteer attorney for the ACLU at the time, and over lunch a friend from the Urban League told him about complaints from a coalition of black organizations that the housing authority was only building new housing projects in black neighborhoods, he recounts in his book, Waiting for Gautreaux. The selection of public-housing sites was politically motivated: The housing authority couldn't buy land in white neighborhoods without the city council's approval. But keeping black people in black neighborhoods violated the equal-protection clause of the Constitution, Polikoff argued, and that argument formed the basis for the lawsuit he filed in August of 1966.
In 1969, a federal judge in Chicago issued an order preventing the housing authority from constructing new public housing in predominantly African American neighborhoods unless it also built public housing elsewhere. It also prohibited the city from constructing dense concentrations of public housing.
Not satisfied with this settlement, Polikoff argued that the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) should be required to remedy its past errors, and in 1976, the Supreme Court agreed, ruling that the government could be required to use the entire region to do so. A consent decree led to HUD agreeing to fund a voucher program to move black families to the suburbs.
"We thought we were not going to prevail," he told me. "But I think when we amassed the evidence through discovery, the evidence was compelling—they were doing this because they felt they had to keep black people out of white neighborhoods."
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Between 1976 and 1998, more than 7,000 families received vouchers through Gautreaux, about half of whom moved to 115 suburbs around Chicago, with the assistance of placement counselors. Suburbs that were more than 30% black were excluded from the program. Families that had more than four children or bad credit did not qualify, nor did those who had been found to have damaged their rental housing.
The move was difficult at first for the families, as James Rosenbaum and Leonard S. Rubinowitz documented in their book about Gautreaux, Crossing the Class and Color Lines: From Public Housing to White Suburbia. In the racially-charged times of the 1970s, black families were sometimes harassed on the streets by whites, followed by teenagers in cars, or called racial slurs. One girl who entered a white school was so unaccustomed to seeing so many white faces that she turned around and ran home.
But many of the families said these threats were nothing compared to the violence they'd been subjected to in the inner cities.
"Here in the suburbs, I don't have to worry about people shooting at people, seeing people chase people, fighting," one woman told the researchers.
Such anecdotal accounts line up with the data: Scholars who have studied the program have found that families who moved to the suburbs were able to achieve more in school and work, not having to worry about violence.
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"What I saw over and over again was that low-income kids had unseen potential that they could not see in the housing projects and that emerged when they moved," said James Rosenbaum, a professor of sociology at Northwestern who extensively studied the Gautreaux families.
A study of suburban Gautreaux mothers in the 1990s found that they were more likely to be employed than mothers who had received vouchers to move within the city. Gautreaux children in the suburbs were more likely to graduate from high school, attend four-year colleges, and to have jobs than their peers who had moved to other city neighborhoods. They also had higher pay and benefits than the other children. Even mothers who had not had jobs before were more likely to get jobs if they moved to the suburbs, Rosenbaum told me in an interview.
Later research showed that two-thirds of the families remained in the suburbs 15 years after their move. Long after the program ended, mothers who moved through Gautreaux continued to live in low-poverty areas and have higher household incomes.
Gautreaux isn't easy to empirically evaluate -- it didn't have a control group, and some scholars have questioned whether its effects are really significant, since the participants were screened. But Rosenbaum said some of the families who moved were just following someone else, and were sometimes not good parents at the outset.
"I don't think the 'self-starter' model really describes a large number of them," he said. "You had a thorough change in environment, and there were some high achievers, but even the average and below-average kids in the suburbs can expect good outcomes. That kind of kid in the city cannot."
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Partially because of the success of the Gautreaux program, HUD decided to sponsor a randomized experiment to see whether such an approach could be scaled. Called Moving to Opportunity, the program, which began in 1994, selected families from some of the most distressed housing projects in Chicago, Baltimore, Boston, Los Angeles, and New York. Between 1994 and 1998, the program enrolled 4,604 families. Three-quarters were on welfare and fewer than half of the household heads had a high-school diploma.
Moving to Opportunity was a randomized experiment, and had a control group that did not receive access to any new services through the housing authorities. One group of