'Waiting For Gautreaux': Desegregating Public Housing

"The book, whose title is a play on words on Samuel Beckett's existential play Waiting for Godot, is an account of Chicago's Gautreaux housing case, the granddaddy of housing desegregation cases. Polikoff was the principal lawyer for public housing residents."

"Like Gautreaux, the Baltimore public housing case, Carmen Thompson et al v. United States Department of Housing and Urban Development et al, raises policy and legal questions. To wit: Is it better to spend more money housing fewer poor people but dispersing them more widely through more affluent communities where access to better schools and jobs give them a better chance for success? Or is it better to house more people in less expensive areas, thereby perpetuating the concentration of poverty and its attendant ills with which we are all too familiar?"