American Pharaoh (85 page)

On February 10, a federal court ruled against the city in the
Gautreaux
case. The landmark decision confirmed the obvious: that the Chicago Housing Authority had discriminated against blacks for
decades in where it located its projects and which tenants it allowed to move in. The case had begun in 1965, when the Illinois
affiliate of the ACLU set up a Civil Rights Committee, which investigated the city’s public housing policies. Alexander Polikoff,
then a lawyer in private practice, agreed to head up a team to investigate the possibilities of litigation. The ACLU filed
its class-action suit against the CHA on August 9, 1966, on behalf of Dorothy Gautreaux, a public housing tenant, and other
black tenants and applicants. The plaintiffs charged that since 1950, virtually all the sites selected by the CHA to build
family housing were “in Negro neighborhoods and within the areas known as the Negro Ghetto” because of the CHA’s policy of
avoiding placing public housing in white parts of the city. The plaintiffs charged that the CHA’s policies violated the Civil
Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits racial discrimination in federally funded programs.
³

The case had been assigned to Judge Richard Austin. It looked at first like another example of an important lawsuit being
assigned to a judge who owed a political debt to Daley. Austin and Daley had a long history. Daley had plucked him from obscurity,
handing him the Democratic nomination for governor against incumbent William Stratton in 1956. Afterward, Daley was responsible
for President Kennedy appointing Austin to the federal bench. But Austin’s gratitude may have been tempered by hard feelings
over the 1956 gubernatorial race. It was said at the time that Daley had struck a deal with Stratton that in exchange for
increasing Chicago’s taxing authority, the machine would run a weak campaign against him in the next election. The rumor was
that Austin had been “trimmed,” or not given the machine’s full support. The evidence on this point is mixed, and Austin may
simply have lost a very close election because Adlai Stevenson dragged down the whole Democratic ticket that year. But the
1956 election may also have inclined Austin to use the case to pay Daley back.
⁴

Austin seemed skeptical about the lawsuit at first. Polikoff recalls that Austin’s initial reaction to the plaintiffs’ claims
was “Where do you want to put ’em? On Lake Shore Drive?” But his views changed after the plaintiffs set out their claims of
racial discrimination in painstaking detail. Their case, which unfolded over two and a half years of pleadings and hearings,
explained how the CHA had worked with the political establishment to keep public housing out of white wards. Of the thirty-three
project sites that had been proposed by the CHA since 1950, the plaintiffs noted, thirty-two were in predominantly black neighborhoods.
And since Daley’s election as mayor, virtually every new unit of housing built by the CHA had been built in the black ghetto.
Of 10,256 family apartments completed or in development, 18 were in the Lincoln Park urban renewal area, 12 were in the Hyde
Park urban renewal area, and another 33 were in a white neighborhood with a growing black population. The remaining 10,193
apartments — 99.4 percent of the total — were located in black neighborhoods. The result of these “siting” decisions was that
by 1967, outside of the CHA’s four white projects, the city’s public housing tenants were about 99 percent black. “The pattern
of segregation,” the plaintiffs charged, “has been nearly perfect.”
⁵

The plaintiffs’ case also featured damaging testimony from the CHA’s own employees about the degree to which racial considerations
permeated its operations. C. E. Humphrey, executive director of the CHA from 1968 to 1973, gave a view from inside the agency
of the cooperation between the CHA and the City Council about racial consideration in site selection. As for tenant selection,
Tamaara Tabb, former supervisor of tenant selection for the CHA, testified that the CHA had different policies for whites
and blacks. The agency had a firm policy of keeping apartments in Trumbull Park, Bridgeport, and other projects vacant rather
than rent them to black families, Tabb said. The CHA kept separate waiting lists for blacks and whites, and the Central Rental
Office and the staffs of each of the four white projects were instructed not to rent to “B” families — CHA code for blacks.
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In the end, Judge Austin was convinced. “Given the trend of Negro population movement, 99#189; per cent of the CHA family
units are located in areas which are or soon will be substantially all-Negro,” Judge Austin wrote. “It is incredible that
this dismal prospect of an all-Negro public housing system in all-Negro areas came about without the persistent application
of a deliberate policy to confine public housing to all-Negro or immediately adjacent areas.” Judge Austin directed the parties
to work out a plan to address the illegal racial discrimination.

Daley’s initial reaction was restrained. He was concerned, he said, that placing restrictions on site selection would slow
down the building of new housing. “We are facing a difficult situation,” Daley said. “We need more housing immediately, but
how do we get it?”
⁷
That was a problem Chicago and other cities were faced with long before the
Gautreaux
decision was handed down. Federal money for large-scale public housing was far below the levels of the 1950s and early 1960s.
The CHA’s last significant construction had been a modest 1967 project, known simply as “Scattered Sites,” consisting of 300
apartments in nineteen low-rise buildings scattered throughout the Black Belt. Daley also argued, as the Daley camp had at
the housing summit with King, that the real answer was to come up with a solution that involved the entire Chicago metropolitan
area. Experts were saying, Daley noted, “that there also should be public housing in the suburbs as well as Chicago.”
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When the parties were unable to agree on a plan to implement the court’s judgment, on July 1, 1969, Judge Austin issued his
own instructions to the CHA. Judge Austin not only ordered the CHA to stop discriminating prospectively, he imposed an affirmative
requirement that the CHA redress its past misdeeds by placing a disproportionate number of new units in white neighborhoods.
The court divided the city into different racial spheres. It designated the city’s minority census tracts — those with 30
percent or more nonwhite population — as a “Limited Public Housing Area.” The rest of the city it called the “General Public
Housing Area.” Judge Austin ordered that the next 700 units of public housing be built in the General Public Housing Area.
After that, 75 percent of all units would have to be built in the General Public Housing Area. Housing projects could rise
no more than three stories and contain no more than 120 residents, the court ordered, and they could make up no more than
15 percent of the total housing in their census tract.
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Judge Austin’s July 1 remedial order, with its detailed plans for building housing in white neighborhoods, provoked an angrier
response than his earlier ruling that discrimination had taken place. Residents of white neighborhoods lashed out at Judge
Austin — it was noted often that he lived in the suburbs, which were neither a “Limited Public Housing Area” nor a “General
Public Housing Area.” And they flooded elected officials with demands that his orders be resisted. “If I wanted my wife and
family to live near blacks, I would have moved closer to Cabrini-Green,” one white man wrote his alderman. Congressman Pucinski
said the ruling “probably has dealt the death blow to public housing here.” The CHA made a few gestures toward accepting the
court’s decision. It hired a Chicago community relations agency, Community Programs, Inc., to put together a public relations
campaign to try to change white perceptions about public housing. The cornerstone of the campaign was an attempt to persuade
whites that the “new look” in public housing would fit in well in their neighborhoods.
¹⁰

While Judge Austin was issuing his first
Gautreaux
ruling, Daley was squaring off with neighborhood activists over the Model Cities Program. Model Cities was a federal anti-poverty
program that picked up where the Community Action Program had left off. Its goal was to create demonstration programs — or
“models”— of what kind of urban programs could work to alleviate the problems of the ghetto. The architects of the program
intended for it to be politically savvier than the ill-fated CAP. It was to be run out of the Department of Housing and Urban
Development, rather than the more ideologically driven OEO, and its community participation requirements were considerably
less demanding than CAP’s “maximum feasible participation.” Nixon HUD secretary George Romney said bluntly that “it will be
up to the mayors how they spread the money.” Finally, a federal guideline Daley could live with. He took full advantage of
his new prerogatives.
¹¹

From the outset, it was clear that Chicago’s Model Cities Program would operate along the same lines as the Chicago model
developed for CAP. To direct Chicago’s Model Cities, Daley had installed Erwin France, a state employment bureaucrat who would
soon run for Congress with the machine’s backing. The application the city submitted to HUD more than a year earlier was prepared
by city agencies that were firmly under Daley’s control. Daley did not solicit input from the four neighborhoods — Woodlawn,
Lawndale, Grand Boulevard, and Uptown — that he was proposing as Model Cities sites. The Woodlawn Organization objected to
Daley’s heavy-handed approach and in December 1968 announced that it had submitted its own application. Two months later,
Daley and TWO worked out a compromise under which TWO got limited representation on the Model Area Planning Councils that
ran Chicago’s Model Cities program, and TWO withdrew its application for Model Cities funding. As with the CAP councils, Daley
made sure the Model Cities planning councils remained firmly under his control. He appointed half of the members outright,
and the ward organizations were able to control most of the remaining elected seats. More than 10 percent of council members
held Model Cities jobs — in violation of HUD rules — and many more held government patronage jobs. “This is a perfect example
of the way the machine tries to control things,” the executive director of the Better Government Association charged. “There
are nearly 50 council members in Model Cities and other jobs who probably believe they must go along with the [political]
bosses to avoid getting fired.”
¹²

Daley and the machine siphoned off much of the Model Cities money before it could reach the needy. A 1972 investigation by
the
Chicago Tribune
found that almost half of the program’s $53 million budget went to administrative expenditures, many of dubious value. France
set up a costly central-office bureaucracy, with nine staff members assigned to public relations. Delegates from the four
Model Area councils attended a conference at the Conrad Hilton in downtown Chicago, and spent thousands of dollars to stay
overnight at the hotel. But the greatest beneficiaries of the program were Daley’s machine cronies. The single biggest recipient
of Model Cities money was the insurance company founded by Joe Gill, Daley’s predecessor as machine boss, which received at
least $195,000 in premiums on contracts for which there was no bidding. Another $185,000 in insurance premiums was awarded
to a firm that shared an office and telephone switchboard with Gill’s firm. Model Cities money was funneled to an array of
other machine leaders and Daley allies: $140,000 to the Real Estate Research Corp., headed by Daley housing aide James Downs;
$127,000 to Urban Associates, Inc., headed by former city planning commissioner Ira Bach; and $30,000 to Crown Office Supply
Co., whose president was Reuben Arvey, brother of former machine boss Jacob Arvey. Model Cities jobs were handed out as machine
patronage, to applicants who came with sponsorship letters from their ward committeemen. Despite the Hatch Act’s prohibition
on federal employees participating in partisan politics, the Chicago Model Cities Program payroll was filled with machine
politicians and hangers-on, including Cook County sheriff Richard Elrod’s uncle Samuel Elrod, a precinct captain in the 48th
Ward; and a rabbi at the temple attended by 46th Ward committeeman and state senator Robert Cherry.
¹³

In the end, Daley and the machine had no trouble crushing the idealistic vision behind Model Cities. Much of the money that
was not wasted on administrative expenses and sweetheart contracts was simply sent out in the form of checks to poor people,
a large number of whom used the money not to improve their neighborhoods but to move out of them. All four Model Cities neighborhoods
lost a large percentage of their population during the course of the program.
¹⁴