WELFARE / BREAKING THE CYCLE : Flight to the Suburbs Is Proving Worthwhile : Resettlement project shows that black mothers are adapting well to life in previously all-white areas.

Vicky Washington’s life is in flux these days. The suburban apartment complex she lives in with her two children is going condo soon and she’s going to have to leave her comfortable three-bedroom townhouse along a small lake.

She doesn’t know yet where she’s going to end up, but there’s one place Washington will fight like hell to stay away from--the hard-bitten, hair-raising housing projects of Chicago, where she was reared.

“If you come from an area where there are roaches and gangs and crime is rampant, then this seems like a pretty good place to live,” Washington said of her home in Aurora, about 25 miles west of the city. “Dealing with a little racial tension now and then is nothing compared to having your life threatened every day.”

Washington, a single, black welfare mother who lives in a largely white suburb, is part of an unusual experiment in social engineering that researchers say is helping to explode myths about America’s underclass.

Called the Gautreaux project, the 14-year-old program has resettled some 3,500 poor black families from crime-ridden public housing complexes in Chicago to scattered sites in integrated or all-white neighborhoods around the metropolitan area. Some stayed in the city while others moved into the suburbs. Named for the woman who filed a landmark Chicago open housing suit more than two decades ago, the project is sponsored by a nonprofit fair housing group that helps subsidize rents.

Recently, sociologists at Northwestern University studied a cross-section of Gautreaux participants and concluded that it was far easier for welfare mothers like Washington to thrive in suburban surroundings than most experts had ever believed.

Sampling opinions from Gautreaux mothers who lived both in the suburbs and the city, researchers found that the suburban dwellers found it easier to get a job even if they had never before held one. Despite race and class differences with their neighbors, the suburban women reported as much success at finding friends as their city counterparts while feeling safer and more satisfied with schools than those who stayed in Chicago, researchers said.

Such findings could have broad implications in the long, fruitless search for ways to break through the depressing cycle of poverty that has gripped generations of urban blacks. They also suggest that integration of all-white suburbs might not prove as wrenching an experience to blacks or whites as many people presume.

Susan Popkin, who co-authored the study, said researchers had expected that efforts to find work by suburban Gautreaux mothers might be hamstrung by the long-term effects of poverty, poor education and welfare dependency. But the study found that 13% more of the suburbanites held down jobs than city dwellers. Among those who had never worked before, 46% of suburban participants found jobs as opposed to only 30% of their urban counterparts.

“This tells us that people do respond to opportunities and their environments,” said Popkin, a research associate at Northwestern’s Center for Urban Affairs and Policy Research.” . . . They tell us that they feel better, less depressed and more motivated because they don’t worry any more about themselves or their kids.”

Life in suburbia was by no means perfect. They complained that public transportation was poor and medical care for those on public aid was inferior to that available in the city. About half the women reported that they had experienced some racial harassment from either the police, neighbors or others during their first year in the suburbs.

Still, they said most of the incidents were minor and tended to subside over time. About three-quarters of both city and suburban residents said they had made friends in their new surroundings, but the suburbanites tended to have more white friends than Gautreaux mothers who stayed in city neighborhoods.

Such has been the case with Washington, 35, a divorcee who grew up in the rough-and-tumble Rockwell Gardens project on Chicago’s southwest side. Under Gautreaux, she’s lived in various suburbs west of Chicago since 1982 and found work as a computer programmer while taking courses to learn court reporting.

Her 12-year-old son, Wesley, sometimes has trouble making friends with kids in school because his clothes aren’t as fancy as theirs and he can’t afford the latest computer games that they have. But Washington said Wesley fits in better in the suburbs than he ever would if the family were forced to go back to the city and public housing.

“My son is never going to be accepted in the projects,” she said. “This program creates a whole new class of people. Once you’ve had an education you can’t get stupid again.”