Ronald Reagan was president, and trying to make his conservative doctrine the ideology of the land, when the federal government took Atrium Village to court.
But now the Justice Department has apparently flip-flopped. Last month it settled the case on terms the Atrium Village lawyers had been proposing from the start. After three years of legal fighting, and at a cost to Atrium managers of at least $250,000 in legal bills, Atrium Village is getting the message that for all intents and purposes they were right all along.
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The irony is that Atrium Village set up its quotas at the federal government’s urging. During the Carter years of the late 1970s, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development helped Atrium Village get off the ground. At that time, the area that became Atrium Village was a “no-man’s-land of high crime, low development, and little hopes for revival,” says Heine.
“Most of the area along [Orleans] was just vacant land because the houses had been torn down during various urban-renewal programs,” says Heine. “The churches wanted housing for their parishioners. But they were not developers, and they didn’t know how to get these things done.”
“It was clear to the state and to HUD that Atrium Village could not be maintained as a racially integrated complex unless occupancy controls were created,” says Michael Shakman, one of the lawyers defending Atrium Village. “The reason is that white people were not prepared to live near Cabrini-Green. And the federal government wasn’t going to insure the loan if they thought the complex was going to fail.”
According to Heine, the racial quotas were established at the insistence of the federal government–which then changed its stance in 1987. Ed Meese was attorney general, and William Bradford Reynolds was in charge of the Justice Department’s civil rights division. Both men believed that quotas, like other forms of affirmative action, are discriminatory–no matter how well intended.
So the Justice Department sued, seeking to prevent Atrium from ever employing quotas. The suit, which asserted Atrium’s management was discriminating against blacks, seems ludicrous to Atrium’s residents.
