Scattered Sites
Scattered Sites
Site #4 Description…
Scattered site housing is generally defined as a public housing building with 15 or fewer units, originally required to be built in a non-minority neighborhood. As we will see, however, this definition has, at best, strained by the history of its construction in Chicago. In practice, scattered site housing refers to many small scale public housing developments that do not fit the “classic” high-rise public housing model of the immediate post-WWII era. Examples include new construction single-family rental homes, multi-unit low-rise complexes, older housing stock purposely acquired for low-income renters, and affordable units in mixed income developments of all shapes and rises. Scattered site housing largely replaced concentrated high-rise public housing following the Gautreaux Ruling of 1969. This ruling, named after lead plaintiff Dorothy Gatreaux, found the CHA–in their construction and management of public housing–had practiced racial discrimination and exacerbated problems of concentrated poverty and segregation in Chicago.
Examples of scattered site-type housing. Sources: Squarespace stock, New Jersey Institute of Design’s Affordable Housing Design Advisor, Robert W. Krueger Photograph Collection at Chicago Public Library.
US Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes’ “neighborhood composition rule” had made public housing an instrument of segregation since the founding of the federal Federal Housing Administration (FHA) and the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) in the 1930s. For Black Chicagoans—excluded from federally-subsidized white suburbs and facing an extreme housing shortage as the result of redlining, rental discrimination, and the Second Great Migration—public housing was in extremely high demand during the post-war years. In spite of this demand, CHA commissioners in charge of “White” public housing continued to discriminate against Black applicants, accepting “non-priority” White applicants before their “priority” Black counterparts. Around 1950, the CHA under Executive Director Elizabeth Wood began to respond to pressure from groups like the Council Against Discrimination (CAD) to integrate public housing. Wood and others faced political backlash from predominantly White residents, however, and the Black residents who moved into White public housing projects were often met with violent resistance, as in the case of the Trumbull Park and Airport Homes.
(Clockwise from upper left) First image: White rioters flip a Black resident’s car at the Airport Homes, temporary housing for WWII veterans in West Lawn, 1946 (AP, public domain). Second image: a later example of the type of temporary, “prefab” homes that the CHA erected for veterans (Courtesy of Chicago Public Library, Chicago Department of Urban Renewal Records). Third image: The Trumbull Park Homes, erected in 1938, were the site of racist exclusionary violence in 1953 when a number of Black families moved into the previously White project (C. William Brubaker Collection, University of Illinois Chicago). Fourth image: a 1954 clipping from the Chicago Defender on the one-year anniversary of the Trumbull Park Riots. Daniels of the Defender notes that the police were sympathetic to the White rioters and did little to stop them (Courtesy of the Chicago Defender [Real Times Media]).
While construction of public housing picked up speed in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Illinois state legislature had empowered the Chicago City Council to veto sites for housing projects selected by the CHA. This power allowed the nearly all-White council to essentially dictate the location of all new public housing, and the policy of the group was to locate projects in inner cities and predominantly African-American neighborhoods. These policies of segregation and discrimination sparked the filing of two cases, one against the CHA and the other against the newly established US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), in 1966.
Image of Dorothy Gautreaux, lead plaintiff in two landmark public housing cases (Courtesy of the Dorothy Gautreaux Foundation).
Dorothy Gautreaux was an activist and community organizer who was deeply involved in the civil rights movement in Chicago, especially in fighting for justice in public housing and schools. She was the lead plaintiff in a landmark case that forever changed the shape of public housing. In 1966, Gautreaux and three other residents, with the legal assistance of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), brought a case against the CHA. They alleged that the CHA’s execution of public housing in Chicago violated Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, prohibiting racial discrimination in federally funded projects, as well as their constitutional right to equal protection under the law. The plaintiffs accused the CHA of maintaining patterns of racial segregation in their choice of sites for building family public housing and their use of quotas in selecting tenants. In 1969, the court ordered the CHA to (1) increase units for low- income housing, (2) build 700 public-housing apartments in non-minority areas, (3) cease the construction of high-density high-rise projects, (4) not discriminate in allocating units to tenants, (5) keep 50% units for neighborhood residents, and (6) not concentrate scattered-site buildings in any one neighborhood (putting a 15% lid on public housing in any census tract). The Gautreaux ruling was also influential in the creation, through the Community Development Act of 1974, of the Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher program.
In a parody of the French Revolution, this summer 1982 cartoon from Keep Strong magazine depicts then mayor Jane Byrne as Marie Antoinette, stating “Let them have festivals!” The caption “Famous last words” references the upcoming 1983 mayoral election (depicted as the hooded executioner), in which Byrne would lose to Harold Washington. The image shows how housing concerns, specifically the lack of scattered site construction, were front and center in Chicago’s 1983 democratic mayoral primary. Courtesy of Helen Shiller.
However, following the ruling, the city council continued to use its veto power to suppress the building of public housing, rejecting the CHA’s recommended site purchases. No new CHA buildings were constructed for the next five years until, in 1974, Richard Austin, judge in the Gautreaux case, stripped the council of its authority to reject the CHA’s site choices. Regardless of this change, neighborhood resistance, a poor economic climate, and foot-dragging on the part of the CHA led to the construction of only a few hundred units over the next 10 years. In 1979, the Gautreaux ruling was modified, removing the mandate to build in non-minority areas before others, adding that CHA provide housing for the elderly, and requiring that it rehabilitate 300 units for every 100 newly constructed units. However, this revision did not accelerate the process sufficiently until then Mayor Harold Washington appointed a new executive director of the CHA in 1984, finally sparking an earnest attempt to construct scattered site housing. However, in spite of a flurry of new construction, HUD rejected the CHA’s request for essential funding and the administration was nearly bankrupted.
1987 headlines from the Chicago Tribune illustrate the push and pull relationship between HUD and the CHA under the Reagan Administration in the 1980s. The failure of the CHA to obtain further HUD funding, combined with the Authority’s failure to fulfill the requirements laid out by the Gautreaux orders, led it to be placed in receivership.
A tent city erected on a vacant lot to protest the lack of scattered site housing construction. A similar encampment was erected in Uptown in the fall of 1988 on a CHA-owned lot. Photos by Debbie Weiner. Courtesy of Chicago Rehab Network, from their 1988 May/June newsletter.
The CHA’s dire financial straits, along with the organization's overall failure to produce housing since the Gautreaux ruling 15 years prior, led the court to appoint a receiver to implement the scattered-site program in 1987. Real estate developer the Habitat Company was entrusted to complete the development through a mix of strategies including construction, acquisition with rehabilitation, and acquisition without rehabilitation. By the mid-nineties, Habitat had constructed 1,377 new units and rehabbed 231 units, however, most of these units are located in minority-dominated and low-income neighborhoods. This had been justified using the argument that selecting properties in such neighborhoods allows one to create more total affordable housing units—in other words, the same funding dollars yield more units by building in low-income neighborhoods. However, this state of affairs warrants the question of whether scattered-site housing has achieved the objectives laid out by the Gautreaux rulings.
Scattered site housing at 4435 North Racine in Uptown. The homes sit across the street from the Truman College campus and within the Hank Williams Village plan area. Photo courtesy of sociologist and photographer David Schalliol.
During its time at the helm of the scattered-site program, Habitat built or acquired 128 units in Uptown. Uptown is home to a total of approximately 170 units of scattered site housing. This relatively high number is due to a confluence of factors including: the neighborhood’s demographic make up, the large number of empty lots around Uptown during the 80s, the leadership of Alderwoman Helen Shiller, and the organizing efforts of individual groups like the Jesus People or alliances between groups like the Anti-Displacement Coalition. After Gautreaux, the CHA had to try to build housing in non-minority areas to avoid the segregation and concentration of poverty in Black and Brown neighborhoods. At the time of the 1980 census, Uptown was a majority White and low-income neighborhood, making it a sensible location for new CHA scattered sites. However, perhaps because of the financial issues it faced, the CHA was slow to build and it took the work of local organizers to prod and push the authority into action.
In 2000, the CHA, then under direct control by HUD, unveiled their “Plan for Transformation”. The plan called for the elimination of thousands of existing public housing units, with the promise the CHA would match the losses one-for-one with rehabilitated older units and new construction. In reality, the CHA failed to rehabilitate or build enough housing to make up for thousands of units that were demolished as a part of the strategy. In spite of the relative success of scattered sites in terms of resident satisfaction, the CHA has moved away from building this type of housing because of the high costs associated with maintaining disparate buildings. Instead, the CHA has leaned into the housing voucher program which allows residents to select from privately owned properties where rents are subsidized by federal funds. This shift signals a move away from the more ambitious–if seriously flawed–efforts at public housing of the twentieth century, exemplified by high-rise projects and scattered sites, and towards a more complete public subsidization of private enterprise. In Uptown, many scattered site properties still remain.
Photos of construction and demolition in Chicago during the implementation of the CHA’s Plan for Transformation. Photos courtesy of sociologist and photographer David Schalliol, from his series Chicago Housing Authority's Plan for Transformation (2003-Present).
Copyright 2018 Dis/Placements Project
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