NO HOUSING WHERE THE JOBS ARE

...William Sullivan, minority housing specialist in the personnel department at Argonne Laboratory—a position created out of desperation last September —told me, "We pay our janitors here $101 a week...

...He's not going to move unless he has a job," said Hampton McKinney, employment and guidance director for the Chicago Urban League...

...Black Men's Dilemma No Housing Where the Jobs Are by JERRY DE MUTH The breaking down of racial barriers in employment has brought into sharp focus the complex problems the Negro still faces in shaking off the bonds of the inner-city ghetto...

...Industries would have more qualified Negro applicants if they were free to move here...

...whose majority stockholder is Sears Roebuck and Co...

...If a person sees that the jobs exist only out in the suburbs," commented Mrs...

...Although more moderate priced homes are being built in the suburbs, there is a great need for apartment units...

...Industry needs a large labor pool to draw upon, and suburbia can no longer successfully lure industry to enrich its tax base without providing both more housing and a wider variety of housing, available to everyone...

...The other four couldn't remain on the job because they don't have cars...

...Strictly enforced strong fair housing laws—particularly local and state laws—can help the Negro home seeker...

...David Cohen, executive director of Tri-Faith Employment, said that Tri-Faith cooperated with three aluminum trade groups in sponsoring a one-week training program in which ten men were taught how to apply aluminum siding...

...The reason, the Council found, was not discrimination by employers concerning jobs, but rather discrimination in housing...

...Many suburbanites no longer come into the city to work...

...Yet in Chicago, organizations such as Operation Breadbasket, the Chicago Urban League, Tri-Faith Employment, the YMCA's Jobs Now, and the Lawn-dale Adult Education Program—all of which attempt to find jobs for the ghetto Negro—have almost totally given up trying to place him in suburban jobs...

...Yet unemployment among Negroes is worsening, although many of the available jobs are of the semi-skilled and unskilled type Negroes can fill without further training...

...Even if every worker had his own car, he would still have to fight heavy traffic for longer and longer hours as industry locates farther and farther from the ghetto...

...Officials from several industries in Chicago's western suburbs, including Meyercord Company and Container Corporation of America, have begun plans to create a non-profit corporation which would build such housing, hoping to attract the persons of all races they need to fill job openings...

...In north suburban Wilmette, Postmaster Jon Patrick Hanley said that twenty of 120 positions at the Wilmette post office are unfilled, mainly because of the lack of housing there for Negroes, although Negro employes could afford housing in the suburb...

...for retail trade jobs, sixteen and forty-seven per cent...

...But once a worker is found and hired, it still is not any easier for him to get to his job...

...huge shopping centers spring up in the countryside...

...Argonne National Laboratory, located southwest of Chicago, has only 255 Negroes on a staff of 5,053...

...A study in the January, 1968, issue of Fortune reported that only one of five Negroes wanted to move from his community...

...We're an equal opportunity employer," he added, "but equal job opportunity must be extended to include equal housing opportunity...

...They have had to work through fair housing and human relations groups that are in touch with individuals willing to sell their homes on a non-discriminatory basis...

...Some industries in Chicago's western suburbs have had to cut back on expansion plans or transfer operations elsewhere because they cannot hire the needed workers...

...Part of the solution to the housing shortage may be found in the building of FHA-financed 22 D-3 medium priced apartment units...

...and the already underemployed or unemployed Negro in the ghetto is left with fewer and fewer chances of finding a job...

...Nor will he take a job without a nearby place to live...

...Those jobs simply are not accessible...

...The Federal fair housing law will open the suburban housing market to Negroes only slowly and slightly...

...Militant Negro leaders, including James Farmer, stress that Negroes should remain in and improve their own communities...

...Public transportation—trains, buses, rapid transit lines—is still oriented toward the person who commutes from the suburbs to the center of the city...

...Chicago passed a weak ordinance in 1963 and it is feebly enforced...

...fair housing law...

...The device to make suburban jobs accessible that has been tried most extensively is improved transportation...

...Nor is the new Federal fair housing law likely to alter this situation to any appreciable degree...

...Even training programs, then, are affected by the growing distance between black housing and employment opportunities...

...This "carry them out to work at dawn and bring them back at night" approach smacks of the old plantation system, however, especially when the worker can afford housing near his job but is denied it only because of his race...

...Rents are such that moderate income families can afford to live in them...

...and DeSoto Chemical Coating, Inc...

...Reflecting the expanded travel to suburban jobs, Chicago's expressways have become crowded with traffic going both to and from the city during rush hours...

...Since 1966, eleven Chicago suburbs have also passed fair housing laws but most of these are upper-income suburbs beyond the reach of Negro workers...

...A pilot bus program, financed by HUD, is in operation in Los Angeles...

...Otherwise equal employment opportunity doesn't exist...

...They have their own transportation...

...Most lived either in Chicago or in other nearby cities with large Negro ghettos, where they paid disproportionately higher rent in addition to the cost of traveling...

...If anything, the black community is becoming more concentrated—and more isolated...

...This problem is growing in such major metropolitan centers as New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Chicago...

...Edwin Berry, executive director of the Chicago Urban League, put it this way: "More than 300 firms in the area send us job listings...

...They were paid $50 for the week and received free tools...

...The first is least likely to occur...

...Eight trainees completed the program...

...Moreover, Negroes are being denied access to the better paying jobs, for suburban industries generally pay more than do those still located in the city...

...Most Negroes who have moved into white suburban communities in the Chicago area have purchased their homes outside of the regular broker channel...

...The explanation for this was the fear of excessive tardiness on the part of the employe, particularly in bad weather...

...Other industries encourage car pools, but usually one person, as the only car owner, does all the driving...

...However, a 1967 survey at Argonne showed that the majority of Negro employes wanted to move closer to their jobs...

...The white janitors are living in [suburban] DuPage County but the Negro janitor who can also afford to live out here lives in Chicago...

...But it is not easy for the ghetto Negro even to apply for jobs at these suburban firms...

...And persons working with employment programs in Chicago state that,, in spite of the severe handicaps, Negroes will be moving to suburbs in increasing numbers...

...Of 700 major corporations questioned by the Fantus Company, a subsidiary of Dun and Bradstreet, only 112 said they would build plants in slum areas, and then only if they received tax advantages, stabilized costs, a "tractable" and adequate labor supply, and blight-elimination programs...

...The number of jobs in metropolitan areas is increasing...

...The industries of our metropolitan areas increasingly flee the central city for the suburbs...

...Des Plaines, all tell of losing talented and valued Negro chemists because these professionals would not travel long distances from the city yet could not find housing nearby...

...Sara Lee Bakeries, Deerfield...

...Maximum income levels are set for occupants, who are chosen on a nondiscriminatory basis...

...JERRY DE MUTH is a staff writer for the Chicago Sun-Times who covers race relations and suburban affairs...

...This would, of course, result in excluding virtually all Negroes from consideration by firms located in areas of Chicago that are far from Negro neighborhoods...

...The Federal Department of Housing and Urban Development has a plan to subsidize bus service designed to carry workers from the city inner-core to plant locations outside the ghetto...

...Surveys have revealed that ghetto Negroes pay fifteen per cent or more than whites for the same housing...

...Industry is dispersing, but the Negro is not...

...When a Federal subsidy is involved, it amounts to subsidizing segregation...

...Many local fair housing ordinances go further than the U.S...

...groes must be assured of both jobs and housing in the suburbs...

...Officers of Jobs Now admit they could place more inner-city Negroes in jobs if those jobs were made readily accessible by the availability of nearby housing...

...Joan Brown of Chicago's Women Mobilized for Change, "he wonders why he should go into training at all...

...The Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics revealed that between 1959 and 1965 service jobs in metropolitan Chicago increased by twenty-four per cent in the area as a whole butrose by sixty per cent in the suburbs...

...This is especially true for Negroes who often are doubtful as to the type of reception they will receive and so do not want to rush into a home purchase...

...Suburbs are no longer upper-class bedroom communities where the skilled professional lives...

...Officers at such companies as G. D. Searle Company, Skokie...

...Other companies, including Illinois Bell Telephone Company and Borg-Warner Corporation, have been forced to find housing for skilled Negro employes...

...A survey we made," he added, "shows that only nineteen per cent of the applicants who come into our offices have access to cars during working hours...

...The president of a Wheaton firm admitted, "Housing keeps many Negroes out...

...Then, when we talk to guys who are qualified, they say, T can't drive thirty-two miles one way every day...

...In early 1967 the Voluntary Human Relations Council of Chicago's suburban Wheaton surveyed area businesses and found that less than seventeen per cent had any Negro employes...

...For manufacturing jobs, the respective figures are six and twenty-seven per cent...

...No longer is the early morning traffic mainly the inbound suburbanite and the late afternoon traffic the homeward bound suburban commuter...

...Yet many people live in apartments before buying a house and settling in a new area...

...Its enforcement provisions are clumsy, at best...

...Meaningful open occupancy in all the suburbs, improved public transportation, and the relocation of industry in the ghetto—all three approaches are vital if we are to narrow the widening gap between the inner-core and the suburbs, between the blacks and the whites, between the haves and the have-nots in the nation's metropolitan areas...

...For this move to materialize, there are two intertwined requirements...

...And the third is by moving many ghetto residents so that they live nearer to the new jobs in the suburbs...

...Ne"The Federal fair housing law will open the suburban housing market to Negroes only slowly and slightly...

...These are units constructed by private non-profit organizations with Federal long term, low interest loans...

...There are three ways in which new jobs can be made accessible to the inner-city Negro...

...One is by expanding existing industry or building new industry in the ghetto area...

...The second is by improving transportation between the ghetto and the location of new jobs...

...The Illinois legislature has repeatedly refused to pass a state-wide fair housing law...

...The act does not go into full force until 1970, and even then a large proportion of suburban style housing will remain exempt...

...Few Negroes, perhaps only 100 families, lived in the area which is some twenty miles from Chicago's west side Negro ghetto and even farther from the south side ghetto...

...David P. Taylor, assistant professor of industrial relations, Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, reported in a recent Chicago Urban League report: "[Some] companies set limits on the distance a new employe may travel to work...

...But even skilled Negroes often do not take jobs in suburban industry because the work location is simply too far from available housing...

...They work for the industries which have located in the suburbs, not just for space and parking reasons, but because of proximity to the homes of skilled and managerial workers...

...It costs about eighty-nine cents a mile to run these buses, while they earn only about thirty-five cents in fares...

...If that one person is sick or his car breaks down, then a whole group of workers is stranded...

...They are also home for a vast middle class, some of whom have fled the city, but many of whom live in suburbia because that is where their work is...

...Opening the suburbs legally is essential, but providing the proper housing economically is equally important...

...He cannot travel from factory to factory, making application, as he did in the city, where he often traveled by foot, with an occasional bus ride...

...A study released in March, 1968, by Pierre de Vise of De Paul University, revealed that Chicago's south and west sides, the two black ghetto areas, lost 90,000 jobs in the decade after 1955...

...Its overall weakness is indicated by the fact that of the twenty-three states that have open housing legislation, fifteen have laws that are broader and tougher than the Federal act...

...And here another prejudice emerges, for the suburbanite frequently becomes almost hysterical at the mere thought of an apartment building being constructed in his community...

...A few private buses begin their run within the ghettos, but most start from the end of city public transportation lines...

...To overcome this problem, at least one Chicago suburban firm has sent mobile employment units into Chicago's ghetto areas...

...It lias now become imperative that jobs also be located near the homes of the semi-skilled and unskilled workers—or the Negro worker of any category, including skilled—and that housing for them be located near the jobs...

...I'm going to work in town.' Negroes must then seek work at less money somewhere near the inner-city...

...To prevent situations which may cause absenteeism, some industries will not hire workers who live long distances from their work...

...Industry, with the strength of economic power in its hand, is increasingly arguing for local and state fair housing laws to open up new areas to Negroes so that they can take the jobs that are available...

...A survey at the laboratory in 1966 revealed that Negro employes traveled an average of twenty-five miles each way to their work...

...Four are still working," Cohen said...

...As a result, industries, or the workers themselves, often provide their own bus service to the suburbs...

...Industry officials are clamoring for workers, and many of their firms are equal opportunity employers that want Negro employes...