Gautreaux v. Chicago Housing Authority was a 1966 federal class action that proved the Chicago Housing Authority had deliberately concentrated public housing in Black neighborhoods and kept Black families out of white ones. The case ran through the federal courts for decades, reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 1976, and produced both a landmark ruling on desegregation remedies and a relocation program that placed roughly 7,100 Black families in white and integrated neighborhoods across the Chicago region.
The Segregation the Suit Challenged
Under Illinois law, the Chicago City Council had to approve every site before the CHA could acquire land for a new project. In practice, the CHA went a step further and cleared each proposed site with the alderman of the ward where it would sit, dropping any site the alderman opposed. Because the CHA’s waiting list was roughly 90 percent Black, white aldermen routinely vetoed projects in their wards to keep Black families out.
CHA’s executive director, C.E. Humphrey, acknowledged the practice under oath. Asked whether the City Council would refuse to approve sites in white neighborhoods, he answered, “I am assuming from what had been going on the last few years that you just couldn’t go anywhere in the City of Chicago that you wanted to and acquire a site.” Pressed on whether he specifically meant white neighborhoods, he replied, “Right.”1Justia. Gautreaux v. Chicago Housing Authority, 296 F Supp 907
Tenant assignment worked the same way. The four CHA projects located in white neighborhoods operated under what Humphrey called “elastic quotas,” which functioned as fixed caps on Black occupancy. Tenants at those four projects were between 93 and 99 percent white, even though Black applicants vastly outnumbered white ones.2Justia. Gautreaux v. Chicago Housing Authority, 4 F Supp 2d 757
Who Sued and on What Grounds
In 1966, six Black tenants and applicants for CHA housing filed suit in federal court on behalf of themselves and all similarly situated Black residents. The case took its name from Dorothy Gautreaux, a civil rights activist who lived in the Altgeld-Murray apartments on Chicago’s South Side. She died of cancer in July 1969 at age 41, months after the first ruling in her favor.
Alexander Polikoff of Business and Professional People for the Public Interest, a Chicago public-interest law firm, led the legal team and remained lead counsel for the entire life of the litigation. The plaintiffs filed two companion suits: one against the CHA over its site selection and tenant assignment practices, and one against the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development for funding those practices. The claims rested on the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection guarantee against the CHA, and on the Fifth Amendment and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 against HUD.3Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Hills v. Gautreaux, 425 US 284
The 1969 District Court Ruling
On February 10, 1969, Judge Richard B. Austin ruled that the CHA had operated a racially discriminatory system in choosing where to build public housing and in deciding who could live there.4Justia. Gautreaux v. Chicago Housing Authority, 304 F Supp 736 The statistics left little room for doubt. Excluding the four projects in white neighborhoods, 99.5 percent of CHA’s family housing units sat in neighborhoods that were at least half Black. Two-thirds of the total were in neighborhoods more than 95 percent Black.1Justia. Gautreaux v. Chicago Housing Authority, 296 F Supp 907
The judgment order that followed on July 1, 1969, required the CHA to build its next 700 family units in predominantly white areas. After that, the CHA had to maintain a three-to-one ratio: for every unit built in a “Limited Area” (a neighborhood at least 30 percent minority), it had to build three in a “General Area” (a neighborhood at least 70 percent white). The ratio was later relaxed to one-to-one.2Justia. Gautreaux v. Chicago Housing Authority, 4 F Supp 2d 757
The companion case against HUD ended much the same way. The court of appeals found that HUD had “retained a large amount of discretion to approve or reject both site selection and tenant assignment procedures” and had used that discretion “in a manner which perpetuated a racially discriminatory housing system in Chicago.” By the time the case reached the Supreme Court, HUD accepted that it had violated the Fifth Amendment and Title VI by knowingly funding the CHA’s program. The only open question was how far a court could reach to fix it.3Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Hills v. Gautreaux, 425 US 284
Hills v. Gautreaux and the Reach of the Remedy
The Supreme Court answered that question on April 20, 1976, in Hills v. Gautreaux. Lower courts had approved a remedy that extended beyond Chicago’s city limits into the surrounding suburbs. HUD objected, pointing to the Court’s 1974 decision in Milliken v. Bradley, which blocked a school desegregation plan that would have merged Detroit with dozens of suburban school districts. The Milliken Court had held that federal courts cannot impose remedies on jurisdictions that did not themselves commit violations.5Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Milliken v. Bradley, 418 US 717
The Court unanimously rejected HUD’s argument and allowed a metropolitan-wide remedy. The distinction was about who had done wrong. In Milliken, the suburban school districts were innocent parties, so a federal court could not restructure them. In Gautreaux, HUD itself was the wrongdoer, and HUD already had statutory authority to operate across the entire metropolitan housing market. Ordering HUD to place families in suburbs did not force innocent local governments to run someone else’s remedy; it required HUD to use its own existing authority in a nondiscriminatory way.3Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Hills v. Gautreaux, 425 US 284
The Court pointed to Section 8 of the Housing and Community Development Act of 1974 as the mechanism. Under that program, HUD could contract directly with private landlords and developers to make units available to low-income families without needing suburban housing authorities to participate. Local governments could still comment on proposals and enforce zoning, but they could not simply block the program.
The Gautreaux Assisted Housing Program
The practical result was the Gautreaux Assisted Housing Program, which ran from 1976 to 1998. The Leadership Council for Metropolitan Open Communities, a private nonprofit fair housing organization, administered it across a six-county area around Chicago.6HUD USER. Expanding Housing Choices for HUD-Assisted Families Eligible Black families received Section 8 housing certificates that came with a condition: they could only be used in predominantly white or racially mixed neighborhoods. Families unwilling to make that move did not receive certificates.
The program was more than a voucher handout. Counselors screened families, prepared them for life in a new community, recruited landlords across the region willing to accept voucher holders, and provided follow-up support after the move. That combination of financial assistance and hands-on guidance was unusual for housing programs at the time.
By 1998, the program had placed roughly 7,100 African American families. More than half moved to predominantly white suburban communities. The rest moved to revitalizing neighborhoods within the city.
What the Research Found
The Gautreaux program became one of the most closely watched social experiments in American housing policy, largely thanks to research by Northwestern University sociologist James Rosenbaum. His studies compared families who moved to the suburbs with those who moved to other city neighborhoods. Suburban movers had higher employment rates than city movers, and the gap was especially pronounced among adults who had been unemployed before entering the program. Children who grew up in the suburbs were significantly more likely to graduate from high school, attend college, enroll in four-year rather than two-year institutions, and hold jobs with better pay and benefits.
Those findings shaped federal policy. In 1992, Congress authorized the Moving to Opportunity demonstration program, which HUD launched in 1994 in Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York. MTO was explicitly modeled on Gautreaux, testing whether vouchers paired with counseling could reproduce those gains on a broader scale. Its results were more mixed than Gautreaux’s, but the program established housing mobility as a recognized tool in federal anti-poverty strategy.
How Court Oversight Ended
The housing placement program hit its 7,100-family target and closed in 1998, satisfying HUD’s obligations under the consent decree. Court oversight of the CHA’s own construction and tenant assignment practices continued much longer. In 2000, the CHA launched its Plan for Transformation to demolish high-rise projects and replace them with mixed-income developments, and portions of that plan operated under court-ordered requirements traceable to the Gautreaux rulings, including obligations about where and how many replacement units the CHA had to build. Consent decrees and agreed orders tied to the case continued to shape CHA activity well into the 2010s, making Gautreaux one of the longest-running civil rights lawsuits in American history.