Washington By TOM LITTLEWOOD

Court ordered federal housing includes suburbs: A breach in the great white wall?

GEORGE W. ROMNEY, the former governor of Michigan who served as secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in the first Nixon Cabinet, had many traits that annoyed fellow politicians. One of these was his disinclination to treat complex problems with deceptively simplistic rhetoric. In and out of office, for example, he persisted in speaking of the needs of the "real city," a term he used to encompass the entire metropolitan area. Race relations can never be successfully managed, he said over and over again, as long as the metropolis is partitioned into dozens of separate and autonomous governmental units all acting independently in their own interest. This multiplicity of independent political units is a segregating mechanism that makes it easy for suburbanites to divorce themselves from the problems of the central city.

So many social ills are related to this political partitioning of the suburbs that Romney's theme seems obvious. Yet the mere suggestion of metropolitan integration remains so slippery, politically, that most elected officials don't want to take a chance on falling through the ice. Social change of that magnitude is left for federal judges who are protected by their political life preservers — lifetime tenure.

In its last term, the U.S. Supreme Court in Hills v. Gautreaux (96 S. Ct. 1538, 1976) held that the "real city" is, in fact, the "real housing market." Where HUD, as in this case in Chicago, stood by and permitted unconstitutionally discriminatory central city public housing policies, the federal courts can seek to correct the effects of that segregation by ordering some federally assisted housing in surrounding suburban communities. Besides housing opportunities for minorities, the decision contained important federal-state-local implications in the civil rights law.

Previously, in the case of Milliken v. Bradley (418 U.S. 717), the court ruled that 54 suburban school districts could not be ordered consolidated and joined with the Detroit schools in a pupil transfer arrangement that would reduce racial separation. That finding was based on "fundamental limitations on the remedial powers of the federal courts to restructure the operation of local and state governmental entities." It would not be equitable, the court said, to involve the independent outlying districts in the remedy when only the central city had discriminated in pupil assignments — even though the outlying districts may have had no minority students against whom to discriminate. Insofar as schools are concerned, that precedent appeared to insulate suburban districts, if they are set up independently, from whatever happened or did not happen in the city.

The housing case was found to be different though because HUD, which administers federal housing assistance all over, had been guilty of unconstitutional conduct for supporting Chicago's segregated housing. In the Milliken case in Detroit there was no evidence of unconstitutional behavior by suburban school officials, and no demonstration that Detroit's discrimination had any "segregative effects" on suburban schools, two standards that Justice Potter Stewart said may not be satisfied in the Chicago metropolitan housing market. The lower appellate court had mentioned the likelihood of impact outside the city caused by HUD's "intracity discrimination" in Chicago.

Although the cases are similar, Stewart said the Milliken precedent did not mean that "parties found to have violated the Constitution" cannot be made to "undertake remedial efforts" beyond the city boundaries. Political boundaries drawn outside the city do not alter the "real city" housing market, which is the entire metropolitan area.

But would a metropolitan-wide order against HUD interfere improperly with suburban governments not implicated in HUD's unconstitutional conduct? Would the sanctity of local political autonomy that was spelled out in Milliken be violated? Not, Stewart explained, if HUD is careful to honor local housing assistance plans and zoning restrictions. As a practical matter, as long as exclusionary zoning is held to be constitutional, determined suburbanites are still free to screen out housing for low-income residents.

Anything smacking of metro consolidation is still thin ice for most legislators. When the federal revenue-sharing extension bill was before the House in June, Rep. Benjamin Rosenthal, Democrat of Long Island, N.Y., nailed on an amendment in committee requiring state master plans and timetables for "modernizing" and "revitalizing" state and local government. Before a state could cash its revenue sharing check it would report annually to the Treasury Department on the steps it was taking to reach the goals. It was suggested in the legislation that the states would want to reduce the number of limited-function general governments. Rosenthal pleaded that all he was trying to do was help the states and localities become more efficient in their use of shared funds. Republicans raised such a howl about "federally dictated centralized planning and control" that the amendment was decisively stripped away when the bill reached the floor.

Metro government is unpopular; unless, as is sometimes true in the South, consolidation is a vehicle for the white suburbs to retain or regain political control of a city with a new black voting majority.

September 1976 / Illinois Issues / 31