Caught in a Bias Bind

Chicago’s Atrium Village housing development is caught between conflicting regulations from the Justice Department and the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Right now it would probably rather be stuck between a rock and a hard place.

When a group of Chicago church leaders decided in 1978 to build an integrated housing complex between that city’s segregated Cabrini-Green housing project and its affluent Gold Coast, it turned to the Illinois Housing Development Authority for funds. That organization, acting as an agent for the Department of Housing and Urban Development, stipulated as a condition for a government subsidy that the project be racially integrated. In response, the complex’s developers devised and implemented a quota system to make up a racially and economically integrated complex.

This was, of course, during the Carter presidency--one that held affirmative action in a much more positive light than the current Administration does. Even so, precedents exist for the use of quotas to correct previous inequalities in access to public housing. And Atrium Village had to use quotas to ensure a racially balanced complex, because of its proximity to Cabrini-Green: Federal laws prohibit the construction of housing projects that would extend ghettos and segregated areas. Moreover, the use of quotas in Atrium Village was judged to be consonant with the 1968 Fair Housing Act, which held integrated housing as its primary goal--even if such a policy temporarily restricted minority access to housing.

Atrium Village is now a thriving mixed community, and has since dropped its quotas. But this year the Justice Department filed suit against the complex, arguing that its original quota system was discriminatory and violated the Fair Housing Act. The Justice Department refuses to grant Atrium Village’s request to reinstate the quotas if necessary to correct an imbalance. The department does not buy the argument that Atrium Village, in imposing the quotas in the first place, was only following orders from the Department of Housing and Urban Development. In the end, the Justice Department is suing a small group of Chicago lay and clergy people for having successfully integrated an area once called “no man’s land.”

At issue here is integration’s value as an instrument of social change. Is integrated housing more important than any housing at all, when both are in short supply? This question, although valid, is only tangential to the issue at hand anyway: Atrium Village’s developers claim that Housing and Urban Development approved of Atrium Villages’s racial quotas because at the time HUD held racially integrated housing as a social imperative. In addition, the spirit and intent of the Fair Housing Act and the Civil Rights Act are to promote integration as well as minority access to housing. Now, and not so all of a sudden, things have changed.

The principles truly at stake here are affirmative action and two decades of civil-rights legislation. As part of its trenchant anti-affirmative action stance, the Reagan Administration is looking to eliminate affirmative action in housing. Specifically, the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department and its helmsman, William Bradford Reynolds, are seeking to eliminate race as a factor in access to housing. In other words, while the Justice Department here is suing to prevent the use of race to deny access to housing, it can use the same principle to prevent race from being used as a factor to promote minority access to housing. This would be turning two decades of civil-rights legislation directly on its head.

What’s worse is that affirmative action extends well beyond the realm of housing. A victory for the Justice Department against Atrium Village could set the dangerous precedent of eliminating race as a matter for consideration not only in housing but also in education and employment.