Alexander Polikoff, public-interest lawyer behind landmark CHA segregation case, dies

Chicago Tribune

4 hours ago

Public-interest lawyer Alexander Polikoff spent decades fighting powerful interests, most notably in a case he filed on behalf of Black public housing residents against the city of Chicago that spanned most of his career.
The U.S. Supreme Court in 1976 agreed with Polikoff and his clients' contention that the city had discriminated against Black public housing residents and had selected housing for them based on race. Polikoff spent the next 43 years holding the city accountable until federal oversight over Chicago public housing was lifted in 2019.
'Alex was not motivated by money, fame or life's comforts,' said Hoy McConnell, who succeeded Polikoff as the executive director of Business People and Professionals for the Public Interest, the small public-interest law firm that Polikoff joined in 1970. 'Rather, he dedicated his life to making change to improve the lives of those burdened by poverty and discrimination.'
Polikoff, 98, died of natural causes May 27 at his home in Keene, New Hampshire, said his son, author Daniel Joseph Polikoff. A longtime Highland Park resident, Polikoff moved to New Hampshire in 2022 to be near his daughter.
Born and raised in Chicago, Polikoff was the son of attorney Julius Polikoff. After graduating from Senn High School in 1944, he briefly attended Purdue University before joining the Navy. After his discharge, he earned a bachelor's degree and a master's degree in English from the University of Chicago. He then received his law degree from the Hyde Park school in 1953, and worked for the next 17 years at the firm that became Schiff Hardin.
Polikoff performed extensive pro bono legal work, representing clients alongside the American Civil Liberties Union.
'I don't remember a time when my dad wasn't doing some pro bono work with the ACLU, taking on various causes,' Polikoff's son said. 'That pro bono work was very compelling to him — it was part of his character.'
In 1965, he filed a lawsuit in Lake County on behalf of four pupils to force Waukegan's elementary school board to reorganize school boundaries in order to meet integration standards. The Illinois Supreme Court in 1968 ruled favorably on Polikoff's contention that race could be taken into account to redraw school district boundary lines to achieve integration.
The longest battle of Polikoff's career started in 1966, when he represented a group of Black Chicago Housing Authority residents in a federal class-action lawsuit. The case is known by the name of one of those residents, tenant activist Dorothy Gautreaux. Polikoff alleged that the CHA had practiced racial segregation by building most of its public housing complexes in Black neighborhoods and had deliberately placed Black residents in those complexes.
In 1969, Judge Richard Austin concluded that the CHA had discriminated against Blacks in violation of the U.S. Constitution's equal-protection clause and Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which barred racial discrimination in any program receiving federal aid. Austin also ruled that three public housing units must be built in white areas for every similar unit built in a Black neighborhood.
White aldermen refused to approve sites for new construction. The CHA also dragged its feet by simply stopping building instead of following Austin's directives.
In 1976, the U.S. Supreme Court, ruling on an appeal from the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, unanimously concluded that the CHA had practiced segregation. Justices found that the CHA's problems were regional in nature, and that solutions could occur both in the city and the suburbs. Austin then expanded his order to include the entire metro area as an option for scattered-site housing.
However, suburbs resisted new construction of lower-income scattered-site housing. A 1981 consent decree in the case placed CHA tenants in existing area housing and gave them federal Section 8 rent subsidies.
'The whole idea was to take the thinking beyond the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education ruling that ended school segregation and transfer it to the area of housing,' Polikoff told the Tribune in 1994. '(The) CHA's policy since the early 1950s worked to make each of its 168 high-rise buildings virtually 100% Black. It was illegal, immoral and socially disastrous to pile poor people on top of poor people.'
The CHA eventually altered its operations and demolished numerous high-rises such as Cabrini-Green, the Henry Horner Homes and the Robert Taylor Homes in favor of scattered-site housing. The federal government ended its oversight of the CHA in 2019. At 92 years old, Polikoff was still involved in the case.
'It is well-known that the work Alex led changed public housing practices both in Chicago and nationally, and positively impacted tens of thousands of public housing residents,' said attorney Julie Brown, who worked for decades with Polikoff on the Gautreaux case. 'He was brilliant, of course, but always questioning. He had an uncanny ability to put aside extraneous issues and get to the heart of any matter he addressed. He had an innate sense that justice should prevail and insisted on doing everything he could to try to make it so.'
Alex Kotlowitz, whose award-winning 1992 book, 'There Are No Children Here,' covered hardscrabble life in the Henry Horner Homes, praised Polikoff for challenging the CHA, 'which had become a kind of warehousing for the city's poor. He challenged the nation's conscience.'
'Alex was one of the first to recognize the profound effects of concentrated poverty,' Kotlowitz said. 'The Gautreaux litigation changed more than just housing policy. It forced us to reconsider how we treat the marginalized. It prodded us to consider our collective responsibilities to those who are struggling economically.'
'Gautreaux laid the foundation for the present-day national conversation about mixed-income housing, a reconsideration of how we think about community,' Kotlowitz said.
Polikoff left private law practice in 1970 to join the staff of the public-interest law firm Businessmen for the Public Interest, later named Business People and Professionals for the Public Interest and now known as Impact for Equity. He became the executive director of the group, which provided a full-time platform for continued social justice advocacy, and held that post until 1999. He continued to work as the group's housing director until fully retiring in 2022.
Under Polikoff, the group succesffully fought City Hall's proposal in the early 1970s to build a new airport on landfill in Lake Michigan. It also successfully fought plans for a nuclear power plant near Chesterton, Indiana, on the border of the 12,500-acre Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore, winning a key court fight in 1974 when a three-judge panel of federal judges halted construction. The utility Northern Indiana Public Service Co. formally abandoned plans for a nuclear plant on the site in 1981.
And pressure from Polikoff and his colleagues at BPI and from the Citizens Utility Board spurred utility Commonwealth Edison Co. to announce the settlement of 10 years of rate-case litigation in October 1993 with a record $1.34 billion refund to rate-payers.
Polikoff's 'vision and passion inspired many of us,' recalled Environmental Law & Policy Center CEO Howard Learner, BPI's former general counsel and the lead consumer lawyer in ComEd settlement negotiations. 'Alex was always proud that part of his legacy in leading BPI was the multiplier impact from the number of talented public interest attorneys and vital new organizations that were developed at and grew from BPI to make a difference for the public good.'
Bob Vollen, who worked alongside Polikoff at BPI from 1972 until 1982, said Polikoff had a 'way of posing a question that it allowed no possible answer other than the one he was seeking.'
Polikoff authored five books, including 'Waiting for Gautreaux: A Story of Segregation, Housing and the Black Ghetto,' which was published in 2006. His most recent book, 'Cry My Beloved America,' an examination of anger and frustration in America, was published in 2024.
Polikoff's wife of 71 years, author Barbara Garland Polikoff, died in 2022. A daughter, Joan, died in 2016. In addition to his son, Polikoff is survived by another daughter, Eve Kodiak; and five grandchildren.
Services will be private.