Gautreaux v. Romney

Decision Date26 April 1972
Docket NumberNo. 71-1732 to 71-1734 and 71-1807.,71-1732 to 71-1734 and 71-1807.
PartiesDorothy GAUTREAUX et al., Plaintiffs-Appellees, v. George W. ROMNEY, Defendant-Appellant, and The City of Chicago, Central Advisory Council, and Chicago Housing Authority, Intervenor-Appellants.
CourtU.S. Court of Appeals — Seventh Circuit

L. Patrick Gray, III, Asst. Atty. Gen., James R. Thompson, U.S. Atty., Alan S. Rosenthal, Anthony J. Steinmeyer, Attys., Dept. of Justice, Washington, D.C., for defendant-appellant.

Richard L. Curry, Corp. Counsel, Earl L. Neal, Asst. Corp. Counsel, William R. Quinlan, Daniel R. Pascale, Chicago, Ill., for intervenor-appellant City of Chicago.

H. Ernest Lafontant, Chicago, Ill., for intervenor-appellant Central Advisory Council.

Kathryn M. Kula, Patrick W. O'Brien, Watson B. Tucker, Chicago, Ill., for intervenor-appellant Chicago Housing Authority; Mayer, Brown & Platt, Chicago, Ill., of counsel.

Bernard Weisberg, Alexander Polikoff, Milton I. Shadur, Cecil C. Butler, Charles R. Markels, Merrill A. Freed, Chicago, Ill., for plaintiffs-appellees.

Barbara H. Sidler, Chicago, Ill., for League of Women Voters of the U.S., League of Women Voters of Ill., League of Women Voters of Cook County and League of Women Voters of Chicago, amici curiae.

Before SWYGERT, Chief Judge, DUFFY, Senior Circuit Judge and SPRECHER, Circuit Judge.

DUFFY, Senior Circuit Judge.

This is the third round before us of a bitterly contested controversy. Two suits were commenced in 1966. Our first opinion, by a divided court, appears in Gautreaux v. Chicago Housing Authority, et al., 436 F.2d 306 (7 Cir., 1970). We there held it was not an abuse of discretion for the District Court to impose dead lines and to order the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) to use its best efforts to increase the supply of dwelling units as rapidly as possible.

On the second appeal (Gautreaux v. Romney, 448 F.2d 731 (7 Cir., 1971)), we concluded that summary judgment should be granted to plaintiffs on both Counts I (Fifth Amendment) and II (42 U.S.C. § 2000d, § 601 of Civil Rights Act of 1964), and that HUD had violated the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment by its acquiescence in the pre-1969 site selection procedure of Chicago Housing Authority. However, we made the following statement: "We again point out that our holding should not be construed as granting a broad license for interference with the programs and actions of an already beleaguered federal agency HUD It may well be that the District Judge, in his wise discretion, will conclude that little equitable relief above the entry of a declaratory judgment and a simple `best efforts' clause will be necessary to remedy the wrongs which have been found to have been committed."

The District Court did not choose to follow our suggestions in this respect. On October 1, 1971, 332 F.Supp. 366, the court signed an order enjoining the defendant, George W. Romney, Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) from making available to the City of Chicago, any funds for the second period of the Model Cities Program unless the City complied with certain stated conditions. This order involved the withholding of approximately $26,000,000 in federal funds.

Funds for the purpose of constructing, maintaining and achieving low rent housing are provided by the United States Housing Act of 1937 (42 U.S.C. § 1401 et seq.). The Secretary of HUD is charged by law with the administration of such funds. CHA does not provide any housing, low rent or otherwise, with any funds distributed under the Model Cities Programs.

The Model Cities Programs are created under the Demonstration Cities and Metropolitan Development Act of 1966 (42 U.S.C. §§ 3301 et seq.). Under these Programs the Secretary of HUD is authorized to grant funds for the purpose of enabling cities to undertake various programs for the benefit of low and moderate income people.

Under this legislation, the City of Chicago is and has been carrying on a five-year Model Cities Program. The City has received or was scheduled to receive $38,000,000 a year to carry on various services, which included numerous educational and job-training programs, health care centers, day care centers and other related activities. Approximately 4000 people are employed to carry out the Model Cities Program of Chicago and its related activities. The chief beneficiaries are the poor people of Chicago, many of whom are black.

Among those greatly benefited by the Model Cities Programs are 4328 CHA tenant families at the Robert Taylor Homes (population 27,030), and the 1444 tenant families at the Washington Park Homes (population 8755), located in the City of Chicago. These developments are within the near South Side Model Cities target areas.

There are no District Court findings that the Chicago Model Cities Program has been improperly administered or that it is tainted with racial discrimination. Indeed, the plaintiffs have made no such claim. About 150,000 people are direct beneficiaries of one or more of the Model Cities Programs' activities in the Chicago area.

HUD was prepared to release the remaining sum of $26,000,000 to this Model Cities Program. It would have done so except for this proceeding instituted by plaintiffs. It is candidly admitted that the purpose of the District Court's order was intended to apply pressure on the City of Chicago to compel it to approve of CHA housing sites. The decision to release the $26,000,000 for Model Cities Programs was that of George Vavoulis, HUD Regional Director.

The Regional Director (Vavoulis) was greatly concerned at the devastating impact upon the city's poor which would follow the cutting off of the Model Cities Programs and which, he felt, would far outweigh the hope of spurring the Chicago City Council into action approving low cost public housing sites in predominantly white areas.

Intervenor-appellants well state the question before us to be: "But here one party (HUD) had been ordered to stop financing a program, Model Cities, which is free from taint, in order to force a non-party (City of Chicago) to comply with an order in a case in which it was not a party, nor charged with anything, nor found to have done anything improper and of course, not ordered to do anything."

In a Civil Rights case, the Court's task is "to correct, by a balancing of the individual and collective interests, the condition that offends the Constitution." Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, 402 U.S. 1, 16, 91 S.Ct. 1267, 1276, 28 L.Ed.2d 554 (1971). But here there was no balancing of interests. The rights of the many thousands of beneficiaries of the Model Cities Program were entirely ignored.

The District Court here proceeded as though HUD, in some court proceeding, had been found guilty of some wrong-doing in administering the Model Cities Program in Chicago. This, of course, is not the case.

In a memo to the District Court, HUD stated with reference to the Housing program: "Although the city's Chicago performance to date has not come up to expectations, nevertheless, the city has made some progress in achieving the housing goals set forth in the letter of intent."

HUD also wrote to the District Court: ". . . and since Model Cities money will contribute to essential social services for inter-city residents, it would not be in the best interests of HUD or the citizens of Chicago, to withhold the Model City Funds at this time."

We think it was improper for the District Court to threaten the termination of a program which was not tainted with discriminatory action in order to bring about a cure of a separate program which was found to have been so tainted.

Certainly, the District Court's order lacked a balancing of the individual and collective interests involved. The Court ignored the interest of poor people, mostly black, intended by Congress to be the beneficiaries of the Model Cities Programs while seeking enforcement of a timetable for the erection of housing units in white areas which, although laudable, could not be achieved in time to prevent the catastrophe threatened by the District Court's order terminating federal funds to a program not found to be discriminatory.

In our mandate of Gautreaux v. Romney, supra, (Gautreaux II) issued on September 10, 1971, and in the mandate of the earlier companion litigation decided by our Court, Gautreaux v. CHA, supra (Gautreaux I), we found violations of plaintiffs' rights in federal and city programs for low-income public housing to be made available to low-income families in Chicago.

In spite of minimal Model Cities Program involvement with low-cost public housing for low-income families, the District Court, following our mandate in Gautreaux II, found it advisable to terminate the entire Model Cities Program in Chicago in order to bring pressure to bear upon the Chicago Housing Authority, the Chicago City Council and the Mayor of Chicago. While the Model Cities Program in Chicago does include activities affecting housing and relocation (six of fifty or more Model Cities Program activities) within its broad aim of social, economic and educational assistance to low-income families, these six activities entail expenditures of only $3,000,000 of a total annual budget of $38,000,000 for the Model Cities Program.

In the last of a series of letters between Mr. Vavoulis, the Regional Director of HUD, and the Mayor of Chicago, dated January 6, 1972, the entire annual funding of $20,000,000 for the Neighborhood Development Program (NDP) for 1971 was formally terminated by HUD. Mr. Vavoulis stated as his rationale for such termination: "It was our HUD's sincere belief that the City and CHA proposals as outlined in the Letter of Intent May 12, 1971 letter would lead to a meaningful replacement and expansion of the housing supply for Chicago's low income families . . . that result has not occurred. . . ."

Plaintiffs...

To continue reading

Request your trial
19 cases
  • United Farm. of Fla. H. Proj., Inc. v. City of Delray Beach
    • United States
    • U.S. Court of Appeals — Fifth Circuit
    • April 12, 1974
    ... ... City of Lackawanna, supra ; Dailey v. City of Lawton, supra ; Shannon v. HUD, 3rd Cir. 1970, 436 F.2d 809, 821 ; Gautreaux v. Romney, 7th Cir. 1971, 448 F.2d 731, 738 ; Gautreaux v. Chicago Housing Authority, N.D.Ill.1969, 296 F.Supp. 907, enforced in 304 F.Supp. 736, ... ...
  • Gautreaux v. Chicago Housing Authority
    • United States
    • U.S. Court of Appeals — Seventh Circuit
    • November 1, 1982
    ... ... 1267, 1276, 28 L.Ed.2d 554. With that caveat, however, the federal district judge acting as chancellor "has broad and flexible powers to mold each decree to the necessities of the particular case and to remedy the consequences of past constitutional violations." Gautreaux v. Romney, supra, 457 F.2d at 133 (Sprecher, J., dissenting). The reality in such cases, as we have learned primarily in the school desegregation context, ... Page 610 ... is that the finding of a constitutional violation is in a practical sense only the preliminary hurdle. The heart of the lawsuit is ... ...
  • Stewart v. New York University
    • United States
    • U.S. District Court — Southern District of New York
    • March 16, 1976
    ... ... § 1681(c). See Gautremix v. Romney, 457 F.2d 124 (7th Cir. 1972); Board of Public Instruction of Taylor Co., Fla. v. Finch, 414 F.2d 1068, 1077 (5th Cir. 1969) (hereinafter " Finch ... ...
  • Harris v. White
    • United States
    • U.S. District Court — District of Massachusetts
    • November 2, 1979
    ...revenue sharing funds directly to the state defendants' operations and thus summary judgment would be improper. See also, Gatreaux v. Romney, 7 Cir. 1972, 457 F.2d 124. Even if summary judgment were appropriate, dismissal of these state defendants from the lawsuit at this time would not. Th......
  • Request a trial to view additional results

VLEX uses login cookies to provide you with a better browsing experience. If you click on 'Accept' or continue browsing this site we consider that you accept our cookie policy. ACCEPT