What the American Civil Liberties Union hopes to achieve through its public housing suit is clear. It hopes to duplicate Hills vs. Gautreaux and force the predominantly white counties surrounding majority black Baltimore to house some of the city's poor and subsidized families.
Whether the ACLU suit will manage to repeat what happened in Chicago is quite another matter. Yes, Hills vs. Gautreaux began spreading subsidized families throughout the Chicago metropolitan area, but only because of a long legal tug-of-war that ended favorably for the plaintiffs.
The case began in 1966, when Dorothy Gautreaux and three other black tenants charged the Chicago Housing Authority and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development with discrimination. They claimed that Chicago, in locating federally financed public housing projects, had violated President Kennedy's 1962 executive order that directed government agencies to prevent discrimination in federally supported housing.
In 1969, a federal judge found for the plaintiffs and ordered the CHA to build the next 700 units in white areas and to ensure that 75 percent of future units would be outside black neighborhoods. Chicago immediately announced it would cease any further construction of federal housing. Moreover, the judge absolved HUD of complicity.
The case was appealed and in 1971 a judge ruled that HUD was guilty of aiding and abetting racial segregation in the Chicago metropolitan area. After the Supreme Court reaffirmed the decision, the case finally ended with a 1981 agreement that left intact all-black existing public housing projects but required CHA to help 7,100 black families move outside black neighborhoods with the aid of rent vouchers.
In Baltimore, the Schmoke administration unsuccessfully tried to settle the ACLU complaint before the suit was filed. Considerations of race and class undeniably were among factors that explain why the city's public housing projects are concentrated the way they are.
But another overriding factor is this: Housing segregation is bound to continue for low-income tenants -- and remain another Baltimore City problem -- as long as surrounding jurisdictions refuse to build public housing and private landlords there do not take Section 8 tenants. The city, increasingly poor and black, cannot alone disperse pockets of concentrated poverty.
The outcry in Baltimore County that stopped Moving to Opportunity, a small pilot program to disperse city public housing tenants, shows how contentious these matters are. The same agitation against Section 8 is now going on in Highlandtown, the traditionally white city neighborhood east of Patterson Park.