Poverty Pervades The Suburbs

I thought about posting this in the Economic Crisis thread but then thought that this should be singled out.

After all if you are trying to foment revolution, how best to do that but to erode the middle class?

Poverty Pervades The Suburbs

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September 23, 2011

Guess where most people in poverty live? Hint: It's not in the inner cities or rural America.

It's in the idyllic suburbs.

A record 15.4 million suburban residents lived below the poverty line last year, up 11.5% from the year before, according to a Brookings Institution analysis of Census data released Thursday. That's one-third of the nation's poor.

And their ranks are swelling fast, as jobs disappear and incomes decline amid the continued weak economy.

Since 2000, the number of suburban poor has skyrocketed by 53%, battered by the two recessions that wiped out many manufacturing jobs early on, and low-wage construction and retail positions more recently.

America's cities, meanwhile, had 12.7 million people in poverty last year, up about 5% from the year before and 23% since 2000. The remaining 18 million poor folks in the U.S. are roughly split between smaller metro areas and rural communities.

"We think of poverty as a really urban or ultra-rural phenomenon, but it's not," said Elizabeth Kneebone, senior research associate at Brookings. "It's increasingly a suburban issue."

Suburbia's population has boomed among all classes in recent decades as job growth shifted from central cities to their outskirts. Low-wage workers were needed to service this burgeoning number of residents and companies.

Suburbia became home to the greatest concentration of impoverished residents by 2005, Kneebone said. That stemmed in part from the collapse of the manufacturing industry based outside Midwestern cities. The loss of those jobs contributed to pushing many into poverty.

The Great Recession, however, accelerated the rise of the suburban poor, as it did the overall poverty rate.

The downturn also shifted where in suburbia poverty was intensifying. The collapse of the housing market caused the ranks of the poor to spike in Sun Belt communities, such as those surrounding Lakeland, Fla., and Riverside, Calif. Many low-income people had moved there during the boom to make money building and caring for homes or working in the retailers and restaurants that cropped up to service the new residents.

Who Are The Suburban Poor?

The face of the suburban poor is diverse.

To be sure, there were many suburbanites entrenched in poverty even before 2000. Nearly 10 million people fell below the poverty line at the start of the last decade.

They were then joined by new immigrants, who increasingly skipped the cities and moved directly to their outskirts in search of plentiful, but low-wage, construction or service jobs. The foreign born accounted for about 17% of the increase in the suburban poor between 2000 and 2009, according to a Brookings report.

Also, as wages eroded over the past decade, some people living on the edge found themselves pushed into poverty. For 2010, the poverty line stood at $22,314 a year for a family of four.

"If they are working minimum-wage jobs and see their wages decline or stagnate, they may now see themselves below the poverty line," Kneebone said.

And, of course, there is a whole new set of impoverished suburbanites: the formerly middle class who lost their jobs. These folks may have been living the American dream -- with the house, car and white-picket fence -- but then saw it disappear in the Great Recession.

The Community Action Partnership of Suburban Hennepin has seen a crush of middle-class residents walk through its doors after losing their jobs, said Marcy Harris, planning and development director at the agency, which is outside Minneapolis.

"We saw people who never thought they would use a food bank. They used to contribute to them," Harris said. "And now they are here."

Straining The Safety Net

Once they fall into poverty, suburbanites often have a harder time accessing services that can aid them because many of these areas aren't equipped to handle the growing numbers, especially amid government budget cuts.

"It can be difficult to find help in many suburban communities," said Scott Allard, associate professor at the University of Chicago who has studied the issue. "Providers are overwhelmed with demand or there are not that many providers to begin with."

Nearly three-quarters of suburban non-profit agencies said they are seeing more clients who had never accessed aid, according to a report Allard published last year. A growing number of requests were for help with food or housing.

Many agencies told Allard they had to put newcomers on waiting lists or refer them to other organizations. But these groups are often far apart and difficult to access, especially for those without cars.



Also, many suburban poor don't know where to turn when they are in dire straits. Or they fear the stigma of having to ask for government assistance, not wanting to let their neighbors know they're in trouble.

"By and large, if you drive through the suburbs, it looks like the American dream is still healthy and real," said Donna Cooper, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning policy group. "But behind closed doors, there are increasing numbers of people who don't have jobs, their retirement nest eggs are gone and they can't meet their mortgage payments."

Since poverty in the suburbs still remains largely hidden, it can be hard for charitable organizations located there to raise money.

Kneebone recently visited an affluent suburb of Denver, where the poverty rate has doubled in the last decade. The social service agencies there told her they were having a tough time getting area residents to understand the extent of the problem.

"People still donate to organizations in the city," she said. "They don't realize that right in their own neighborhoods, there is need."

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Plan: destroy the middle class

Status: almost finished

I have to say something here. Those of us who make a "decent income" are targeted in a lot of ways.

I've just basically lost my "fight with city hall". I paid their fucking blood/water money to get them off my back. I couldn't get them to even understand that I was protesting what I consider to be (and 17,000 others in this city who refused to pay) an illegal tax.

That we have a TABOR in place (Tax payers bill of rights) that says the state and local governments can't institute a tax without a vote of the people is an affront to these assholes in office and I don't care WHICH party they belong too.

City workers hate TABOR. City Councils and mayors hate it. UNIONS hate it (especially the ones that run the skools).

Basically, they went around the laws and created a "company" they called Storm Water Enterprise (because at least twice a vote to fund it failed) and they started sending "bills for services" to homeowners and businesses.

The other day several businesses were RAIDING by the County - their cash/receipts were seized and people were arrested even from my understanding so far.

They did this to scare people.

This week they are sending the "bill" to the County assessor or someone involved in tax collection, adding a 10% "Late Fee" on the money and placing it against our TAXES.

If we refuse to pay it, they will come after our property.

Now... if that doesn't make it a "TAX" I don't know what does.

How can these fuckers get away with this?

Well, we're "home owners" and have "property" and most of us live in the "suburbs" or at least in nicer areas of the city who've been fighting this.

What a better way to control people, kick them out of their homes, force them to "pay their fair share" and threaten to raid their business and homes to keep them in line.

It's no wonder this country is going to hell...

There are way too many people in this country that feel they have a right to other people's labors. It's sickening. Vampires.

Maybe there should be a vampire hunt, instead of a zombie hunt?

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Originally Posted by Rick Donaldson

I've just basically lost my "fight with city hall". I paid their fucking blood/water money to get them off my back.

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Don't feel bad, I had to cave once also.

Not sure if I told this before.

In 2004 when we bought this house, the first water bill for for more than 40,000 gallons.

Yeah.

They said I probably had a leak.

Really?

Then where's the damn lake that should be in my yard?

Long story short, it was pay it or we'll shut off the water.

They did knock it down to 27,000 gallons or some such bullshit.

Problem is, there are no options for homeowners.

Here we are levied our annual tax on our house as others are. Of course housing values tanked and if that rate had remained the same, our tax would have gone down. The county voted and raised the rate to adjust the tax as such that we still pay the same amount but have a lesser valued home.

It is 10k/year.

You pay $10K/yr in property tax?

If so, how the hell big is your house?

If too personal, ignore.

From what I gather in conversation, some more modest homes in a neighboring county and on standard land plot size pay more than we do annually. Also, to be upfront, it is just a big ass house. Not a mansion or anything. Nothing really special about it. It is just really really big on a little bit of land.

Well here's a new one Phil.

You've shown us pics of your house.

And so did Rick when he posted pics of his truck or boat, IIRC.

I had 2 pages of TAA open, and actually thought Rick said he paid $10K.

I gotta quit doing that.

my taxes are not 10k. I think I have said my taxes (income) are usually between 28-33% or so.

My HOMEOWNERS stuff is around 800-1000 per year. My house is only about 2300 square feet. Not sure of the lot size, but it's on a hill, and has stair-stepped landscaping, on a "pie" shaped lot.

My taxes are $3800/year for under 750sq feet of living space with about another 200 in our loft that we use as storage. Many people have bigger garages than my entire house.

We are putting an addition on the house. It will probably add 450sq ft in space and who knows on the taxes.

Property taxes infuriate me. I get nothing for them. I don't use the schools. I don't have sewer, I don't have water, I pay for my own garbage pickup and I my community dues pay to fix and plow the roads. Fire is voluntary. So I guess it's police. Almost
4 grand for police to do what exactly for me? Not sure. Hold me up 3 months on a long gun purchaser ID and hold me up 45 days on pistol purchase permits is the only thing I can think of.

God, this pisses me off, now I want move.

Sorry! lol

I told you the place you live sucks. :) But then, you already knew it.

I pay for water. I pay for sewer. I pay for gas for the furnace. I pay for trash pick up. I have no children in school any more. They won't plow the streets in our neighborhood. They won't fix or repair the side walks in front of the houses (they say that's the Home Owner's problem, even though it is a public right of way). In 22 years I've lived in that house, they have NEVER once come through and repaired cracks in the asphalt of the street.

Granted I don't pay as much in taxes as many.... but honestly, what do I get for my tax dollars? Bad schools..... not much more.

Ok. My house is 5k sq ft. It is just really big. An open contemporary style. I have seen similar houses off the Long Island Expressway. Same architect. I think the land is part of the extreme rate. It is 5 to 6 acres. When I saw Mal's rate for his house, I almost felt relief. Sorry Mal, its true.

We have well water, septic field and pay for trash pickup. The only utils brought in are electric and gas, but we also have the propane that part of the house runs on and can convert the rest back to it if needed. We live on unincorporated land and our HOA dues fund the annual patch and repave of the roads back here.

Rick, isn't that always the case with sidewalks? They are public domain but cities tend to put it to the homeowner. When I lived in Huntington Beach, CA, I had a similar issue. The city said it was my problem. Well, this crack was huge and buckled up. An easy trip hazard. I explained calmly to the city, that if anyone were to trip on that sidewalk and get injured, it is their liability, as my liability was released by reporting it multiple times. It is public land. Eventually, that point got through and although it was a messy patch, it got patched.

I am not aware that any place forces it upon a homeowner. I can see that if my own driveway is cracked it's my responsibility. But a "city right of way" should not be the responsibility of the people living in front of a problem.

About 20 years ago I had a tree growing in my yard. It was on the edge of the side walk (and likely was the cause of the cracks in the sidewalk and the street). I needed the tree removed because it was causing all that damage. After looking up the city regulations and the original development area, I found that the city had not only paid for, but planted that tree where it was located. It was supposed to have been a pine (they have deep roots, that don't spread out very far)... instead it was a "Cottonwood" tree which is a pain in the ass, spreads awful white seeds everwhere and has roots that grow OUT instead of DOWN. That means the tree was the cause of the cracks etc.

I called the city multiple times and they kept refusing to send someone out to remove the tree.

To make my point I called them from outside one day near the tree and demanded they removed it before I did. They told me I couldn't, it was "illegal". They couldn't quote me a regulations or city code showing me it was "illegal" so, I started the chain saw and revved it a few times. They FINALLY put me in touch with their "city tree surgeon" who finally "got it". The next afternoon I had a city crew out who not only felled the tree, but removed the stump and most of the roots.

Since then I have not been able to get the side walk fixed but the damage has stopped growing.

I think I will try that "If someone falls, it is the city's responsibility, I refuse to be responsible for something not on my personal property".

Re property taxes... it sems taxes in the NE tend to be higher than other parts of the country. We live a couple hours north of Rick and our taxes are roughly $1,800 annually. The school system stinks and has terrible corruption. We have to pay extra for everything - sports programs, art, music, you name it. My brother still lives in Central New York. He pays about $14,000 annually in property tax. His house is about 3,000 sf in a relatively exclusive area. The schools are well funded as are other programs. I'm not sure what is better. I suppose I enjoy having some control over where I spend my money.

Re suburban poverty... I was just driving down the street in a more middle class to upper class neighborhood and saw a woman on the street corner panhandling. She was caucasion, well dressed and early mddle aged. She semed to me to be a high tech employee who had been laid off. That's the impression she left me with. I've never before seen that in this particular neighborhood. A new trend, I think.

Looks like we were ahead of the curve...

Burn Down the Suburbs?
Not exactly, but Obama is already working to get rid of them

August 1, 2012

Editor’s Note: This article is adapted from Spreading the Wealth: How Obama is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities, by Stanley Kurtz, from Sentinel HC.

President Obama is not a fan of America’s suburbs. Indeed, he intends to abolish them. With suburban voters set to be the swing constituency of the 2012 election, the administration’s plans for this segment of the electorate deserve scrutiny. Obama is a longtime supporter of “regionalism,” the idea that the suburbs should be folded into the cities, merging schools, housing, transportation, and above all taxation. To this end, the president has already put programs in place designed to push the country toward a sweeping social transformation in a possible second term. The goal: income equalization via a massive redistribution of suburban tax money to the cities.

Obama’s plans to undercut the political and economic independence of America’s suburbs reach back decades. The community organizers who trained him in the mid-1980s blamed the plight of cities on taxpayer “flight” to suburbia. Beginning in the mid-1990s, Obama’s mentors at the Gamaliel Foundation (a community-organizing network Obama helped found) formally dedicated their efforts to the budding fight against suburban “sprawl.” From his positions on the boards of a couple of left-leaning Chicago foundations, Obama channeled substantial financial support to these efforts. On entering politics, he served as a dedicated ally of his mentors’ anti-suburban activism.

The alliance endures. One of Obama’s original trainers, Mike Kruglik, has hived off a new organization called Building One America, which continues Gamaliel’s anti-suburban crusade under another name. Kruglik and his close allies, David Rusk and Myron Orfield, intellectual leaders of the “anti-sprawl” movement, have been quietly working with the Obama administration for years on an ambitious program of social reform.

In July of 2011, Kruglik’s Building One America held a conference at the White House. Orfield and Rusk made presentations, and afterwards Kruglik personally met with the president in the Oval Office. The ultimate goal of the movement led by Kruglik, Rusk, and Orfield is quite literally to abolish the suburbs. Knowing that this could never happen through outright annexation by nearby cities, they’ve developed ways to coax suburbs to slowly forfeit their independence.

One approach is to force suburban residents into densely packed cities by blocking development on the outskirts of metropolitan areas, and by discouraging driving with a blizzard of taxes, fees, and regulations. Step two is to move the poor out of cities by imposing low-income-housing quotas on development in middle-class suburbs. Step three is to export the controversial “regional tax-base sharing” scheme currently in place in the Minneapolis–St. Paul area to the rest of the country. Under this program, a portion of suburban tax money flows into a common regional pot, which is then effectively redistributed to urban, and a few less well-off “inner-ring” suburban, municipalities.

The Obama administration, stocked with “regionalist” appointees, has been advancing this ambitious plan quietly for the past four years. Efforts to discourage driving and to press development into densely packed cities are justified by reference to fears of global warming. Leaders of the crusade against “sprawl” very consciously use environmental concerns as a cover for their redistributive schemes.

The centerpiece of the Obama administration’s anti-suburban plans is a little-known and seemingly modest program called the Sustainable Communities Initiative. The “regional planning grants” funded under this initiative — many of them in battleground states like Florida, Virginia, and Ohio — are set to recommend redistributive policies, as well as transportation and development plans, designed to undercut America’s suburbs. Few have noticed this because the program’s goals are muffled in the impenetrable jargon of “sustainability,” while its recommendations are to be unveiled only in a possible second Obama term.

Obama’s former community-organizing mentors and colleagues want the administration to condition future federal aid on state adherence to the recommendations served up by these anti-suburban planning commissions. That would quickly turn an apparently modest set of regional-planning grants into a lever for sweeping social change.

In light of Obama’s unbroken history of collaboration with his organizing mentors on this anti-suburban project, and his proven willingness to impose ambitious policy agendas on the country through heavy-handed regulation, this project seems likely to advance.

A second and equally ambitious facet of Obama’s anti-suburban blueprint involves the work of Kruglik’s Building One America. Traditionally, Alinskyite community organizers mobilize leftist church groups. Kruglik’s group goes a step further by organizing not only the religious left but politicians from relatively less-well-off inner-ring suburbs. The goal is to build coalitions between urban and inner-ring suburban state legislators, in a bid to force regional tax-base sharing on middle-class suburbanites. That is how the practice came to Minnesota.

The July 2011 White House conference, gathering inner-ring suburban politicians for presentations by Rusk and Orfield, was an effort to place the prestige of the Obama administration behind Kruglik’s organizing efforts. A multi-state battle over regional tax-base “sharing,” abetted by the president, would usher in divisive class warfare on a scale likely to dwarf the puny efforts of Occupy Wall Street.

Obama’s little-known plans to undermine the political and economic autonomy of America’s suburbs constitute a policy initiative similar in ambition to health-care reform, the stimulus, or “cap-and-trade.” Obama’s anti-suburban plans also supply the missing link that explains his administration’s overall policy architecture.

Since the failure of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty and the collapse of federal urban policy, leftist theorists of community organizing have advocated a series of moves designed to quietly redistribute tax money to the cities. Health-care reform and federal infrastructure spending (as in the stimulus) are backed by organizers as the best ways to reconstitute an urban policy without directly calling it that. A campaign against suburban “sprawl” under the guise of environmentalism is the next move. Open calls for suburban tax-base “sharing” are the final and most controversial link in the chain of a reconstituted and redistributive urban policy. President Obama is following this plan.

Middle-class suburban supporters of the president take note. It isn’t just the pocketbooks of the “1 percent” he’s after; it’s yours.

Inside The Plot Against The Middle Class

September 28, 2014

Ever get the sense that the middle class is downwardly mobile, being pressed to the floor and squeezed to the limit? It’s not happening by accident. Someone is doing the squeezing: a new class of entertainment and tech plutocrats, cheered on and abetted by a priesthood of media, government and academic elites.

Joel Kotkin’s “The New Class Conflict” (Telos Press Publishing) paints a dire picture of the undeclared war on the middle class. What he calls the Oligarchy (Silicon Valley and Hollywood) and the Clerisy (the media, bureaucrats, universities and nonprofits) enrich themselves and gratify their own strange obsessions at the expense of the middle class.

This New Class, for instance, venerates the city and despises suburbia. They think you should feel the same way — and in innumerable magazine and newspaper pieces, they twist facts to make it sound as if America loves living in apartments and taking trains to work.

Though New York and a few other cities have seen population growth over the last 20 years, the real surges are out there, where the space is.

In 2012, nine of the 10 fastest growing metropolitan regions were in the Sun Belt, mainly in the Southwest. In 2013, lightly regulated Houston saw more housing starts than the entire state of California, writes Kotkin.

So, suburbanites are punished. In California, where the New Class reigns supreme, the middle class is being garroted by environmental and anti-sprawl strictures. Those who wish to live in houses are pushed farther and farther from their jobs, spending more and more on commuting and energy costs. Proposals being debated now would, for instance, allow only 3 percent more housing by 2035 in the exurban part of the Bay Area.

That will, of course, drive up the cost of housing within the approved development belt. Which is fine for the plutocracy that already owns property there.

War on the suburbs

Other California cities are pushing through policies that would radically restrict the construction of detached single-family homes, requiring a density of 20 homes per acre in many cases.

In the past 40 years, median home prices have more than doubled relative to household income in California. In Orange County, a biomedical engineer earning well over $100,000 may not be able to afford a house, writes Kotkin.

It isn’t surprising that the state grows ever more top- and bottom-heavy. With 12 percent of the nation’s population, California is home to about a third of its welfare recipients, while its 111 billionaires hold a collective $485 billion in wealth. The middle class is now an actual minority in the state.

Meanwhile, subsidies continue to flow to the cities: Sprawling San Diego is reserving most of its transportation spending not for its roads and highways but for a foolish mass-transit system that is expected to increase ridership only from 2 percent to 4 percent of travelers. California is, nevertheless, suing the city to get it to spend even more of its state funding on mass transit.

Simple revulsion at ordinary American values and aspirations drove the initial elite snobbery toward the suburbs, which dates at least as far back as 1921. That’s when sociologist Lewis Mumford derided the “dissolute landscape” of “a no-man’s land that was neither town nor country.”New Yorkers fleeing to Queens, Long Island and Staten Island built houses that were “blossoming hideously” at midcentury, in the words of historian Robert Caro.

Anti-suburban snobbery is now dressed up in a green cloak. “What is causing global warming is the lifestyle of the American middle class,” declared developer Andrés Duany. Moving people back to urban cores would be a “climate change antibiotic,” said influential architect Peter Calthorpe.

The New Class hasn’t noticed that America, even as we “sprawl,” has steadily reduced greenhouse-gas emissions, which have come down nearly every year since 2005 and now stand at 1994 levels.

Carbon tax attacks

The disaster fantasies of the Oligarchs and the Clerisy continue to obsess them. That would be fine if they weren’t trying to stick the middle class us with the bill.

Last week, Hollywood oligarch Leonardo DiCaprio headlined a march for climate change, which in turn was cheered on by the media, the federal government and nonprofits.

As if to illustrate Kotkin’s points about the close coordination of the elite groups he describes, take a pathetically low-rated Showtime show dedicated to climate alarmism, called “Years of Living Dangerously.”

It was produced in part by tech billionaires such as Paul Allen and Eric Schmidt’s wife, Wendy, and hosted by celebrity “correspondents” such as Harrison Ford and Jessica Alba (:cry:), was promoted with an appearance by President Obama, who sat down with New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman to call for a carbon tax.

Got all that? Government, media, Hollywood and tech: Check, check, check, check. They’re marshalling all of their powers to scare you into compliance.

The opinions of middle-class Americans are irrelevant to the workings of climate-alarmist machine: By and large, we don’t care about climate change. In a March Gallup poll, climate change came second to last in a list of Americans’ chief worries, well behind issues that the elites shrug off (drug use, the deficit, crime and illegal immigration).

Yet it’s the middle class tax whose taxes subsidize the greeniacs, and it’s they who suffer in the event of any new anticarbon legislation. Such strictures are designed to drive up the price of energy. Filling your gas tank and heating your home eats up a high percentage of your income, but these costs mean nothing to the oligarchy.

A recent carbon-tax law in Australia, exactly the kind of thing Obama was calling for, was billed as “urgent action to stop climate change.”

It came to be understood, more accurately, as a tax on everything. And it would have virtually zero influence on global warming. Australians, when they figured out how the Clerisy had tricked them, booted the government responsible and repealed the tax.

Con jobs

Higher education is increasingly unaffordable, and many of the same forces are at work.

The government, with the media Clerisy cheering its efforts, offers cheap loans to “help the middle class.” Those subsidies are in effect a tax that everyone pays in order to aid the next generation of elites. The extra money siphoned out of your wallet gets filtered through the government and into the pockets of the government-promoting universities, whose costs are shooting up because they keep fattening their payrolls.

Over the last 40 years, university bureaucracy has more than tripled in population — to some 750,000 administrators, who now outnumber professors on campus. All told, the universities employ 1.7 million people, most of them licking their lips at the prospect of indoctrinating 20 million students.

President Obama let the mask slip when he offered to cap payments on, and ultimately forgive, student loans when the graduate becomes a paid-up, fully vested member of the Clerisy — spending 10 years in a government or nonprofit job.

Yep, the regulators will happily pass along the costs of your tuition to the taxpaying suckers — as long as you join their cult and keep the cycle going. It’s as if the Vatican spared no expense to educate the next generation of cardinals, then simply decreed that the general public pick up the tab.

Kotkin wonders whether there is a link between the business model of today’s oligarchs and their obvious disdain for the middle class. Previous business titans — the Fords, Carnegies and Rockefellers — not only employed lots of middle-class workers but they needed the overall economy to grow to produce more and more consumers for their products.

Google, on the other hand, which is worth more than seven times as much as GM, employs one-fifth as many people, and few of those workers can be described as middle class. Google doesn’t add to a thriving middle class, nor does it much care if one is out there: Like most tech companies, it mainly sells eyeballs. It has no cause to worry about growing the base of people who can afford major items like new cars.

Where the old industrial-age titans had a pious glint in their eyes as they talked up the holy pursuit of American growth, today’s oligarchs murmur about “sustainability.” As in sustaining their elite status.

Elitists know best

Just last week, an archbishop of the Clerisy urged middle-class America to get over their fears and submit to their natural rulers.

New York Times columnist David Brooks noted that Congress hasn’t passed much legislation lately. The assumption he didn’t even need to state is that regulatory growth is, to the Clerisy, an axiomatically good thing, like economic growth was once held to be.

Brooks thinks we need to solve this alleged “leadership crisis” and get back to churning out more laws with lots of input from people like him — Brooks is among those clerics who has secret off-the-record chats with President Obama.

You may think the relationship between a journalist and a politician should be like the one between a dog and a lamppost, but Brooks’ understanding is that the relationship should be more like the one between one dog and another dog’s butt.

Wrote Brooks, “We need to get over the childish notion that we don’t need a responsible leadership class, that power can be wielded directly by the people. America was governed best when it was governed by a porous, self-conscious and responsible elite.”

Don’t bother calling Brooks an elitist. He just called himself one.

The crisis is exactly the opposite of the one the Clerisy detects: The middle are feeling left out of the decisions. Home Depot shoppers and Subaru wagon drivers don’t have revolutions, but that doesn’t mean they’re not angry.

“Almost every institution of power,” notes Kotkin, “from government and large corporations to banks and Wall Street, suffers the lowest public esteem ever recorded.”

Many tech moguls, Hollywood and government figures (Al Gore is all three) profit handsomely (as Gore does) by reeling in public subsidies for the green firms in which they invest. But some members of the Clerisy aren’t wealthy. Their primary interest, wrote historian Karl Polanyi, is in safeguarding their social assets and their status. This means steering American life in the direction they choose.

When Samuel Coleridge first used the term in 1830, he said the clerisy were the bearers of the highest ideals of society. Their mission was to transmit them to the less enlightened orders.

What if the rest of us don’t necessarily agree with all those ideals? What if we don’t want to be enlightened? What if what we really care about is our jobs and our paychecks?

Reply the Clerisy and the Oligarchy: Shut up and listen to your betters.

And the beat goes on...

Obama Making Bid To Diversify Wealthy Neighborhoods

June 11, 2015

The Obama administration is moving forward with regulations designed to help diversify America’s wealthier neighborhoods, drawing fire from critics who decry the proposal as executive overreach in search of an “unrealistic utopia.”

A final Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) rule due out this month is aimed at ending decades of deep-rooted segregation around the country.

The regulations would use grant money as an incentive for communities to build affordable housing in more affluent areas while also taking steps to upgrade poorer areas with better schools, parks, libraries, grocery stores and transportation routes as part of a gentrification of those communities.

“HUD is working with communities across the country to fulfill the promise of equal opportunity for all,” a HUD spokeswoman said. “The proposed policy seeks to break down barriers to access to opportunity in communities supported by HUD funds.”

It’s a tough sell for some conservatives. Among them is Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.), who argued that the administration “shouldn’t be holding hostage grant monies aimed at community improvement based on its unrealistic utopian ideas of what every community should resemble.”

“American citizens and communities should be free to choose where they would like to live and not be subject to federal neighborhood engineering at the behest of an overreaching federal government,” said Gosar, who is leading an effort in the House to block the regulations.

Civil rights advocates, meanwhile, are praising the plan, arguing that it is needed to break through decades-old barriers that keep poor and minority families trapped in hardscrabble neighborhoods.

“We have a history of putting affordable housing in poor communities,” said Debby Goldberg, vice president at the National Fair Housing Alliance.

HUD says it is obligated to take the action under the Fair Housing Act of 1968, which prohibited direct and intentional housing discrimination, such as a real estate agent not showing a home in a wealthy neighborhood to a black family or a bank not providing a loan based on someone’s race.

The agency is also looking to root out more subtle forms of discrimination that take shape in local government policies that unintentionally harm minority communities, known as “disparate impact.”

“This rule is not about forcing anyone to live anywhere they don’t want to,” said Margery Turner, senior vice president at the left-leaning Urban Institute. “It’s really about addressing long-standing practices that prevent people from living where they want to.” (Don't get me started on long-standing practices, like excessive taxation, preventing me from living where I want to live! :mad:)

“In our country, decades of public policies and institutional practices have built deeply segregated and unequal neighborhoods,” Turner said.

Children growing up in poor communities have less of a chance of succeeding in life, because they face greater exposure to violence and crime, and less access to quality education and health facilities, Turner suggested.

“Segregation is clearly a problem that is blocking upward mobility for children growing up today,” she said. (:rolleyes:)

To qualify for certain funds under the regulations, cities would be required to examine patterns of segregation in neighborhoods and develop plans to address it. Those that don’t could see the funds they use to improve blighted neighborhoods disappear, critics of the rule say.

The regulations would apply to roughly 1,250 local governments.

Hans von Spakovsky, a fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation, called the Obama administration “too race conscious.”

“It’s a sign that this administration seems to take race into account on everything,” Spakovsky said.

Republicans are trying to block the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule. Before passing HUD’s funding bill this week, the GOP-led House approved Gosar’s amendment prohibiting the agency from following through with the rule.

Though segregationist policies were outlawed long ago, civil rights advocates say housing discrimination persists.

HUD is looking to break down many barriers, but Gosar suggested the regulation would have negative repercussions.

“Instead of living with neighbors you like and choose, this breaks up the core fabric of how we start to look at communities,” Gosar said. “That just brings unease to everyone in that area.”

“People have to feel comfortable where they live,” he added. “If I don’t feel comfortable in my own backyard, where do I feel comfortable?”

Critics of the rule say it would allow HUD to assert authority over local zoning laws. The agency could dictate what types of homes are built where and who can live in those homes, said Gosar, who believes local communities should make those decisions for themselves rather than relying on the federal government.

If enacted, the rule could depress property values as cheaper homes crop up in wealthy neighborhoods and raise taxes, Gosar warned.

It could also tilt the balance of political power as more minorities are funneled into Republican-leaning neighborhoods, he suggested.

The Supreme Court is expected to weigh in on housing discrimination in a related case in the coming weeks. At issue is whether government policies that unintentionally create a disparate impact for minority communities violate federal laws against segregation.

The Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs is facing accusations that it makes low-income housing funds more readily available in minority neighborhoods than in white neighborhoods. This promotes segregation, critics argue, by encouraging minorities to continue living in poor communities where government assistance is available.

Court observers say the case could have a profound impact on HUD’s rule.

He wants to brown the entire country, like a giant Obama standing with a foot on NY and a foot on LA taking a huge diarrhea dump all over everyone.

Yep, pretty much...

With all the attention on Obamacare/SCOTUScare today, here's another real winner that has slipped under the radar.

Judicial Watch Statement on SCOTUS Ruling in Texas Department of Housing v. Inclusive Communities Project

June 25, 2015

Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton made the following statement in response to the Supreme Court’s ruling today in Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs, et al. v. The Inclusive Communities Project, Inc., in which it upheld a federal Fair Housing Act (FHA) interpretation that imposes liability on a state housing decision that disparately impacts certain minorities, despite the absence of evidence of any discriminatory intent:

Today’s Supreme Court “disparate impact” decision in the case of Texas Department of Housing v. Inclusive Communities Project is confused and, as the Court did in its Burwell decision, endorses the Executive Branch’s radical racial rewrite of our federal housing law. The Obama administration unlawfully changed federal housing anti-discrimination law to prohibit practices that result in a disparate impact on minorities. In fact, the law prohibits actions only taken because of race, not actions that happen to disproportionately impact certain races. Unfortunately, this judicial activist decision further enshrines the intellectually impoverished concept of race into the law, it furthers a culture of racial and ethnic politics in American public life, and perpetuates racial and ethnic resentment and intolerance in American society. In fact, the only way to treat the troubled concept of “race” in the law should be to absolutely prohibit its use as a basis for making decisions affecting individuals or groups. Conveniently, such a prohibition is precisely what the Constitution already requires. And, as Judicial Watch has alleged and as Justice Thomas implies in his dissent, the Obama administration corruptly influenced the Supreme Court’s consideration of this issue and has tainted today’s ruling.

Part of the dissent from Clarence Thomas:

Quote:

---

And in our own country, for roughly a quarter-century now, over 70 percent of National Basketball Association players have been black. To presume that these and all other measurable disparities are products of racial discrimination is to ignore the complexities of human existence.

---

:lool:

http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions...-1371_m64o.pdf

From Rush's Monday show. A long read but it was a very in depth segment.

Flooding The Zone: Obama's Plan To Integrate Neighborhoods By Class

July 13, 2015

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Folks, there's another story out there that is being dwarfed by everything that I want to touch on and mention. Actually, there's two or three of these kind of stories that are out there that are just being dwarfed. Remember, I'll give you an example of what I'm talking about.

The week that we have Supreme Court decisions on gay marriage and Obamacare, there was a third Supreme Court decision that maybe is worse than those two, and it was about the court granting legality and permission to integrate neighborhoods based on racial quota, not economics or some such thing. It's a horrid decision and it didn't get much play because it was overshadowed by the soap opera characters of gay marriage and Obamacare.

Well, there's another story, interestingly enough it's about suburbia and neighborhoods, and it's something that National Review writer Stanley Kurtz has been warning about in articles and books for years. It is about Obama's war on suburbia and his attempt to basically eliminate suburbia by taking away those aspects of it that make it an enclave away from urban areas or cities. I want to spend some time today getting into this because it's an interesting object lesson in how this could backfire big time on the left, as it has.

There's a test case for this. I know I haven't set the table on this, so just bear with me for a few minutes here. But they tried this in Westchester County, New York. Westchester County, New York, was a left-wing liberal enclave like most in the Northeast are, and the Republicans basically run the place now because voters had a huge backlash to government efforts to change the makeup and structure -- think what busing was, think of it now in terms of housing is what this is.

Take the same principles of forced busing and convert those to housing from urban to suburban areas, from poor areas to rich areas, except you're not busing people to go to school; you're actually moving them to the neighborhoods with so-called affordable housing. It's a little more complicated than that. The point is that it's something Obama has waited until late in his second term to do because this is something that, if people knew it was going on and knew it was intended, it could cause the same kind of backlash that Obama has caused and in fact has, as I say, in Westchester County. That's one thing that I'm gonna get to before the program ends today, if I can.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: This neighborhood business, folks, and I think it's a little bit... If not carefully and properly done, it's gonna come off as being in the weeds. It's my challenge here is to make the complex understandable. I guess at the outset, let me give you an idea what we're talking about here.

Do you remember forced busing? Forced busing back in the sixties, seventies, and eighties was designed by liberals to bus students to school very far away from their homes in a "compassionate effort," quote/unquote, to integrate communities and the races. In some cases, young black students would be bused to white neighborhood schools, and white students would be bused to black neighborhood schools. And they were far away in most cases. It was farther away than most parents could take the time to drive their kids to school.

So the busing was the only opportunity. Like most of these things, at the outset there was a mixture of opinion. You had people who were automatically opposed to it because it was folly and silly (which it was), and then you had the good intentioned, the well-intentioned multicultural crowd who thought it was like every other liberal plan. "What a wonderful idea! What beautiful intentions! The melting pot in each and every one of our schools. Yes, it's a beautiful thing."

Except it didn't work, and it didn't work not because people didn't want to be integrated. It didn't work because it was a profound inconvenience, it was expensive, and it was misguided. It was seeking to fix a problem that only existed in your average liberal Democrat mind. What wasn't said at the time (which is still true today) is that urban inner city schools weren't nearly as good as suburban schools, and so it was just not fair that the kids in the urban areas didn't get to go to the good schools.

So busing came along to try to fix it. Of course, it didn't work, and it withered away on the vine after way too long a period of time. But the left isn't through. The next idea to come along instead of busing kids, is essentially moving people from one neighborhood to another. "Today, the Housing and Urban Development secretary, Julian Castro," or "Hoo-lee-on," depending on your pronunciation preference. "Today, HUD Secretary Julian Castro announced the finalization of the Obama administration's Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Rule.

"A front-page article preemptively defending the move appears in today’s Washington Post. The final rule" in this mess "is 377 pages, vastly longer than the preliminary version of the rule promulgated in 2013." The Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Rule "is easily one of President Obama’s most radical initiatives, on a par with Obamacare in its transformative potential. In effect..." Look at me. I want you to hear this. "In effect, AFFH gives the federal government a lever to re-engineer nearly every American neighborhood."

It gives the Regime a lever to impose "a preferred racial and ethnic composition."

"AFFH is easily one of President Obama’s most radical initiatives, on a par with Obamacare in its transformative potential. In effect, AFFH gives the federal government a lever to re-engineer nearly every American neighborhood -- imposing a preferred racial and ethnic composition."

If they want your neighborhood to be certain percentage black, certain percentage white, certain percentage female, certain percentage Hispanic, whatever, they now, after this rule, will be able to do it with just the stroke of their pen. They will be able to densify the neighborhood. They will be able to put more people in a neighborhood, put housing there and make it more dense. They will be able to affect transportation and business development in suburb and city alike and weakening or casting aside the authority of local governments over core responsibilities from zoning to transportation to education.

In other words, this rule allows the federal government to trump local communities in zoning, neighborhood makeup. It basically takes away the power of a local county or a local city or a town council in such areas as ethnic composition, racial composition, transportation, business development, and either to weaken or just cast aside totally the authority of local government over responsibilities like zoning, transportation, and education. "Not only the policy but the political implications are immense -- at the presidential, congressional, state, and local levels."

Now, this is a scandal, folks. This is happening without a single vote from Congress, as most everything with Obama in the last year and a half has been. It has not been reported on in the mainstream media. There have been some books written about it. Stanley Kurtz, as I said, National Review, has been trying to get everybody to listen and pay attention to this. He's written articles and he has written books about it, but the Drive-Bys have not reported on this until the day of its release.

Now, the rule, the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Rule, "has been out in preliminary form for two years, and well before that the Obama administration’s transformative aims in urban/suburban policy were evident." Now, three years ago Stanley Kurtz wrote about Obama's policy blueprint in a book called "Spreading the Wealth: How Obama Is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities." If you're not aware of it, you should know that just as a matter of course, the left does not like the suburbs. They resent the suburbs, and for the obvious reasons. Beyond the fact they exist, the left hates 'em for why they exist.

As far as the left is concerned, the suburbs exist because only a select few wealthy people have been able to escape cities and move to and build and develop suburbs away from cities and create neighborhoods more in tune with how they would like to live. The left resents this freedom, the financial ability to do it, and the mobility to do it. The left thinks that the people who've done this are basically a bunch of racists who have simply fled cities because they don't want to have to live next to minorities. And they don't think people should have that ability, that kind of freedom the left looks at racism and bigotry.

So the purpose of this rule is not to force people to move back to the cities, but to rather take control of their suburbs away from them and enforce on the suburbs the same kind of lifestyle and existing conditions that exist in urban America. And that is the "get even with 'em" aspect of the scheme. And that's why the Regime wanted to keep this under the radar. They're not getting any news on this. It's just now being talked about toward the end of the Obama administration, while the zone's being flooded with all kinds of other things that are distracting people's attention to the point that they're not even really aware of this. It was just last month an admission of all of this and the stealth required to pull it off was caught on video.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Now, let me read a little bit here from Stanley Kurtz's piece on this whole Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Rule in National Review. He says that "Obama has downplayed his policy goals" in all of this, i.e., taking over suburbia and imposing his vision of what life in the suburbs should be. He has "downplayed his policy goals in this area and delayed the finalization of AFFH for years, because he understands how politically explosive this rule is." Stanley Kurtz writes that "Once the true implications of AFFH are understood, Americans will rebel."

And that's where I have to kind of pause and say, "That would be wonderful, but would somebody show me the evidence?" There's a lot going on now, primarily economically, that you would think the American people would rebel over. They may express their disagreement in polling data, and they may show up and vote in midterm elections and send Democrats packing, but rebelling, as is meant here, I don't know.

"The only prospect for" making this work, i.e., Obama taking over, the Democrats taking over the suburbs, "is a frog-boiling strategy of gradual intensification." Put a frog in a pot on a stove and the water's cold. Then you turn the heat on, and very gradually the water warms up, and the frog doesn't care because it starts to feel good and good, and all of a sudden the frog realizes it's boiling and can't get out of there, it's too late. That is what Kurtz says is the Obama strategy here.

He points out the Washington Post piece today focuses on race, but Kurtz says "the real story of AFFH is the attempt to force integration by class, to densify development in American suburbs and cities, and to undo America’s system of local government and replace it with a 'regional' alternative that turns suburbs into helpless satellites of large cities."

Now, I happen to know that Kurtz is right about this. I don't think there's any dispute that this is an Obama dream, this is an Obama agenda. The Democrats hate the suburbs for every reason I gave you. They resent people in the suburbs, not to mention the fact that suburbanites genuinely, generally -- there are some exceptions -- but they tend to vote against Democrats.

"Once HUD gets its hooks into a municipality, no policy area is safe. Zoning, transportation, education, all of it risks slipping into the control of the federal government and the new, unelected regional bodies the feds will empower," according to the rule that will be unelected. And this is gonna happen overnight practically with nobody knowing it happens until it does happen. Therefore, it's too late.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Hey, folks, don't doubt me on this. There was a story in The Daily Beast September of 2012, almost three years ago, headline: "America's Last Politically Contested Territory: The Suburbs." Subheadline: "Barack Obama dominates the big city vote, Mitt Romney rules the countryside. Only in the suburbs, writes Joel Kotkin, the candidates face off on even ground." It's not... Look, it's not just the suburbs. The whole South is considered a suburb of America, by the way.

If you want to look at it the way the left does, the whole South is considered an American suburb, and it's looked at as a geographic Republican stronghold, and it has to go. It has to be blown up, and they're in the process of doing it. Now, back to Stanley Kurtz and the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Rule. It is happening. You haven't heard about it because nothing's been made of it, on purpose. It's stealth. It's flying under the radar, while all these other soap opera stories...

And they're important, too. I don't mean to denigrate their importance. Gay marriage, Obamacare, amnesty, all that stuff is quite obviously is drawing all the oxygen. But this is happening. Kurtz says that municipalities across the country can avoid this, but it's gonna be really, really hard. They're gonna have to "seriously consider refraining from applying for Community Development Block Grants and other grant programs sponsored by" Housing and Urban Development.

Because if you take any money from HUD, you are then obviously be forced to submit to its demands. That's how the school lunch program works. If you take federal money for their school lunch program, they get their hooks into your curriculum. Now, when you have a Republican president, conservative government, that's not a big deal, because the desire is not to take over everything and run it.

Those kinds of things wouldn't happen anyway. But when you've got a liberal Democrat or socialist president whose party and his objective is to control everything and everybody? Then stuff like this matters, and it's serious. But not taking HUD money, that's not an option that most communities have because nobody has any money anymore. When we're talking about governments, nobody's got any money!

Everybody runs deficits, other than those places constitutionally required to balance, and even they are floating dollars all over the place. It's an accounting gimmick. Some of them are not even in balance. I mean, you know that somebody comes along offering you money and you're a municipality, a city, you'll take it. "The recent Supreme Court decision in Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. Inclusive Communities Project has provided the federal government with a second club to use against municipalities seeking to escape HUD control."

Now, let's get to the politics because this is what matters and where it's gonna manifest itself. As pointed out earlier, this Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Rule is underneath the radar. It's stealth. It's unacknowledged, by the way. Right now, you don't even have anybody in the Regime admitting to this. That's how volatile it is. I mean, Obama feels perfectly fine running around promising to commute the sentences of felons.

He doesn't think that's gonna be any big deal. He doesn't think anybody's gonna object to that so much, so he's perfectly fine being public about his intentions there. But this, you probably haven't heard much about it, if anything. You may be hearing about it for the first time from me, and you may be thinking, "Nah, this can't happen." Just like you've thought Obamacare couldn't happen and amnesty couldn't happen.

The reason that you always thought that is, "The Republicans will never let it happen." But the Republicans don't try to stop any of this, sadly. But I'm sure many of you think, "Come on, Rush! I've never heard of this! I can't believe, federal government take over the suburbs? Come on." Folks, if that is your attitude, try to get rid of that thinking, because it is a full-fledged attempt (and a crazily held desire) on the part of these people who do want to control everything. They want to control your thoughts, not just be able to mandate your actions!

They're gonna take over, and you will love them.

They're gonna take over, and you will not be disappointed after they do.

They're gonna take over, and you will support them.

If not, you're gonna be buried. You're gonna have an example made of you and your business shut down. Take a look how they deal with photo shops and bakeries in the gay marriage debate. So this rule permitting the federal government to basically take over the ethnicity makeup, the economic makeup, the class makeup of your neighborhood and every other neighborhood is something they haven't admitted to. But it is an effort "to force economic integration on every neighborhood in America."

Just like they tried to force busing, this is to force the same kind of "economic integration," which will also result in class integration, "on every neighborhood in America. In a recent Rasmussen poll, 83% of respondents said that this was not the government's job," to diversify neighborhoods by income level. "Yet in a recent Rasmussen poll, 83% of respondents said it was not the government's job to diversify neighborhoods by income level, while only 8% say," Ah, okay, fine with me.

This is why, according to Kurtz, nobody's talking about it, because there is such massive opposition to it. But the opposition to it is in theory, because the respondents of this poll had no idea it's actually going on. Now, Kurtz uses an example here. His point writing this story, by the way, is he thinks that this represents the best opportunity for rebellion against all that is Obama. Because this something that once people in suburbia learn about it, in no way, shape, manner, or form are they gonna sit idly by and let happen.

He cites Westchester County, New York, as his example.

"Westchester County, New York, where AFFH has had a dry run of sorts..."

The Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Rule has been implicated, or implemented there. "Westchester County, New York ... is now administered by Republican county executive Robert Astorino. Many forget that before the Obama administration tried to force Westchester County to cast aside its own zoning laws and build high-density, low-income housing at its own expense," which is what this rule will do, "Westchester was a liberal Democratic county run by liberal Democrats.

"After all, this is where Bill and Hillary Clinton live." Chappaqua is in Westchester County. "At the local level, the Obama administration drove Westchester into the arms of the Republicans." Just the fact that the Department of Housing and Urban Development was going to come in and cast aside Westchester's zoning laws and force Westchester, at its own expense, to build low-income housing in well-to-do neighborhoods. That's essentially what this rule does, by the way. That's what "integration by class" means.

That means it's not fair that if you live in a very nice house, that somebody should not be able to build a shack next to you. If somebody wants to live in a comparative shack next to you, then they're gonna have the right to! And the community is gonna have to build it 'cause the government's gonna mandate these rules. They're gonna integrate these counties, suburban areas, by class. When Westchester County got wind of it, they voted Democrats out and Republicans now run the county. This is the evidence that Stanley Kurtz says could be extrapolated into an event happening nationwide.

He says: "The same thing could happen nationally, at every political level. But only if the frog wakes up and jumps by November of 2016." That's the time frame everybody has here, November 2016, the election. Between now and then, if enough communities are made aware of what's coming their way and have the ability to vote Democrats out of power so as to have an opposition to the federal rules, and since it's happened in a place that used to be run by the Democrats, Westchester County, Kurtz believes it could be the thing that finally causes a natural eruption against Obama and the Democrat Party.

I'm just telling you what he says. I just want to basically get the ball rolling on informing you of this so that you will not be a frog on a stove in a pot of intensely heating water that you don't realize is a danger until it's too late. We'll see what happens. I've been asking the question for the past month, where is the rebellion on anything? Where's the rebellion on gay marriage? Where's the rebellion on Obamacare? Where's the rebellion on amnesty, other than elections, where is it?

Kurtz thinks the rebellion in elections is enough to take the wind out of the Obama sails at least in this policy area. And taking over the suburbs, I think it is correct to classify it as a Democrat Party objective as they launch their efforts to basically take over the country. Remember, their objective, the Democrat Party objective is the elimination of opposition. They're not interested in people who cross the aisle. They don't compromise, bipartisanship, working together. They're totalitarians. They don't want to there to be an other side. They don't want there to be an other side that can win.

If the Republicans would agree to a hundred members in the House, occasionally go to a committee meeting and maybe get to play golf with a Democrat now and then, the Democrats would accept that. But they do not want there to be an opposition. They don't want to have to debate in the public arena of ideas. They don't want to have to prevail because they don't want there to be a serious opposition. And that's what all these attacks on the South are about, these attacks on the Confederate flag, suburbia, you name it. That's what all of this is aimed at is the elimination of opposition.

END TRANSCRIPT

And Stanley Kurtz's piece from National Review.

Massive Government Overreach: Obama’s AFFH Rule Is Out

July 8, 2015

Today, HUD Secretary Julian Castro announced the finalization of the Obama administration’s Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Rule. A front-page article preemptively defending the move appears in today’s Washington Post. The final rule is 377 pages, vastly longer than the preliminary version of the rule promulgated in 2013.

AFFH is easily one of President Obama’s most radical initiatives, on a par with Obamacare in its transformative potential. In effect, AFFH gives the federal government a lever to re-engineer nearly every American neighborhood — imposing a preferred racial and ethnic composition, densifying housing, transportation, and business development in suburb and city alike, and weakening or casting aside the authority of local governments over core responsibilities, from zoning to transportation to education. Not only the policy but the political implications are immense — at the presidential, congressional, state, and local levels.

It is a scandal that the mainstream press has largely refused to report on AFFH until the day of its final release. The rule has been out in preliminary form for two years, and well before that the Obama administration’s transformative aims in urban/suburban policy were evident. Three years ago, when I wrote about Obama’s policy blueprint in Spreading the Wealth: How Obama Is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities, the administration’s efforts to keep this issue under the radar were evident. Only last month, an admission of the stealth relied on by advocates to advance this initiative was caught on video.

Obama has downplayed his policy goals in this area and delayed the finalization of AFFH for years, because he understands how politically explosive this rule is. Once the true implications of AFFH are understood, Americans will rebel. The only prospect for successful imposition is a frog-boiling strategy of gradual intensification. The last day the frog will be able to jump is Tuesday, November 8, 2016.

Fundamentally, AFFH is an attempt to achieve economic integration. Race and ethnicity are being used as proxies for class, since these are the only hooks for social engineering provided by the Fair Housing Act of 1968. Like AFFH itself, today’s Washington Post piece blurs the distinction between race and class, conflating the persistence of “concentrated poverty” with housing discrimination by race. Not being able to afford a freestanding house in a bedroom suburb is no proof of racial discrimination. Erstwhile urbanites have been moving to rustic and spacious suburbs since Cicero built his villa outside Rome. Even in a monoracial and mono-ethnic world, suburbanites would zone to set limits on dense development.

Emily Badger’s piece in today’s Washington Post focuses on race, but the real story of AFFH is the attempt to force integration by class, to densify development in American suburbs and cities, and to undo America’s system of local government and replace it with a “regional” alternative that turns suburbs into helpless satellites of large cities. Once HUD gets its hooks into a municipality, no policy area is safe. Zoning, transportation, education, all of it risks slipping into the control of the federal government and the new, unelected regional bodies the feds will empower. Over time, AFFH could spell the end of the local democracy that Alexis de Tocqueville rightly saw as the foundation of America’s liberty and distinctiveness.

At this point, municipalities across the country need to seriously consider refraining from applying for Community Development Block Grants and other grant programs sponsored by HUD. Take one dollar of HUD money and you will be forced to submit to its demands, which can reach far beyond housing. Unfortunately, this is a highly imperfect solution, and not only because municipalities would be surrendering money taxed from their citizens’ pockets. The recent Supreme Court decision in Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. Inclusive Communities Project has provided the federal government with a second club to use against municipalities seeking to escape HUD control. (See my piece on Inclusive Communities in the latest issue of National Review.) Ultimately, only a Republican president acting in concert with a Republican Congress can stymie AFFH and undo the damage of the Supreme Court’s recent housing decision.

This brings us to politics. As noted, AFFH is a largely unacknowledged attempt to force economic integration on every neighborhood in America. Yet in a recent Rasmussen poll, 83 percent of respondents said it was not the government’s job to diversify neighborhoods by income level, while only 8 percent say that this is an appropriate task for government. Now you know why the Obama administration and a compliant press corps have kept this initiative quiet.

It will take time to collect the data on which HUD’s new demands for local governments all over America will be based. While important enforcement will begin under the Obama administration, the major impact of AFFH will come under President Hillary Clinton, should she be elected. And Obama’s AFFH enforcer, Julian Castro, is widely touted as a likely vice-presidential running mate for Hillary. That means AFFH is going to be an issue in the next presidential campaign.

And the political implications go deeper still, to every level of government. Westchester County, New York, where AFFH has had a dry run of sorts, is now administered by Republican county executive Robert Astorino. Many forget that before the Obama administration tried to force Westchester County to cast aside its own zoning laws and build high-density, low-income housing at its own expense, Westchester was a liberal Democratic county run by liberal Democrats. After all, this is where Bill and Hillary Clinton live. At the local level, the Obama administration drove Westchester into the arms of the Republicans. The same thing could happen nationally, at every political level. But only if the frog wakes up and jumps by November of 2016. Even with AFFH now public, the Obama administration and the press corps will do everything in their power to obscure the real issues at stake in the massive AFFH power-grab. Don’t let that happen.

Getting Ahead Is Harder In The Suburbs

"By discouraging sprawl, we can not only improve air quality and shorten commutes, but we can also promote upward social mobility," researcher Reid Ewing said.

January 27, 2016

To rise through the socioeconomic ranks, you're better off in the city than the suburbs. New research suggests urban sprawl, also referred to as suburban sprawl, impedes upward mobility.

A team of researchers from Utah, Texas and Louisiana built mathematical models to analyze the different ways urban sprawl can directly and indirectly affect a person's chances of getting ahead.

Their models considered factors like access to jobs and economic diversity. Previous studies have suggested economic diversity encourages upward mobility among the socioeconomically disadvantaged.

The latest research, published in the journal Landscape and Urban Planning, found upward mobility was much higher in high-density urban areas than sprawling areas.

"As the compactness index for a metropolitan area doubles, the likelihood that a child is born into the bottom fifth of national income distribution will reach the top firth by age 30 increases by 41 percent," lead study author Reid Ewing, a professor of urban planning at Utah, explained in a press release.

Ewing acknowledges that America's low rate of upward mobility -- much lower than many European nations' -- can be explained by a number of factors. The new research suggests the United States' built environment plays a role.

"By discouraging sprawl, we can not only improve air quality and shorten commutes, but we can also promote upward social mobility," Ewing said.

More and more people are choosing to live in cities, but urban sprawl continues, even if just slightly, and many of America's biggest, most compact cities are becoming increasingly segregated by both race and income.

And another BULLSHIT "study" to force people into the cities....

Bingo!

I'll just say that my daughter and son-in-law bought a house in the burbs....cuz... they could. They are socialists at heart.

My son... did the same. A hard core conservative Christian... (hoo boy I get shit from him sometimes cuz he thinks *I* am too liberal).

They live 4 houses from each other.

Funny.

I don't see any poverty here.

A blast from the Obama past is coming back...

Biden and Dems Are Set to Abolish the Suburbs

June 30, 2020

President Trump had a great riff at his rally the other day in Phoenix. It was all about “abolish,” about how the Left wants to abolish the police, ICE, bail, even borders. Trump’s riff is effective because it is true. The Left has gone off the deep end, and they’re taking the Democrats with them.

Well, there’s another “abolish” the president can add to his list, and it just might be enough to tip the scales this November. Joe Biden and the Democrats want to abolish America’s suburbs. Biden and his party have embraced yet another dream of the radical Left: a federal takeover, transformation, and de facto urbanization of America’s suburbs. What’s more, Biden just might be able to pull off this “fundamental transformation.”

The suburbs are the swing constituency in our national elections. If suburban voters knew what the Democrats had in store for them, they’d run screaming in the other direction. Unfortunately, Republicans have been too clueless or timid to make an issue of the Democrats’ anti-suburban plans. It’s time to tell voters the truth.

I’ve been studying Joe Biden’s housing plans, and what I’ve seen is both surprising and frightening. I expected that a President Biden would enforce the Obama administration’s radical AFFH (Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing) regulation to the hilt. That is exactly what Biden promises to do. By itself, that would be more than enough to end America’s suburbs as we’ve known them, as I’ve explained repeatedly here at NRO.

What surprises me is that Biden has actually promised to go much further than AFFH. Biden has embraced Cory Booker’s strategy for ending single-family zoning in the suburbs and creating what you might call “little downtowns” in the suburbs. Combine the Obama-Biden administration’s radical AFFH regulation with Booker’s new strategy, and I don’t see how the suburbs can retain their ability to govern themselves. It will mean the end of local control, the end of a style of living that many people prefer to the city, and therefore the end of meaningful choice in how Americans can live. Shouldn’t voters know that this is what’s at stake in the election?

It is no exaggeration to say that progressive urbanists have long dreamed of [url=https://www.nationalreview.com/2012/08/burn-down-suburbs-stanley-kurtz/]abolishing the suburbs. (In fact, I’ve explained it all in a book.) Initially, these anti-suburban radicals wanted large cities to simply annex their surrounding suburbs, like cities did in the 19th century. That way a big city could fatten up its tax base. Once progressives discovered it had since become illegal for a city to annex its surrounding suburbs without voter consent, they cooked up a strategy that would amount to the same thing.

This de facto annexation strategy had three parts: (1) use a kind of quota system to force “economic integration” on the suburbs, pushing urban residents outside of the city; (2) close down suburban growth by regulating development, restricting automobile use, and limiting highway growth and repair, thus forcing would-be suburbanites back to the city; (3) use state and federal laws to force suburbs to redistribute tax revenue to poorer cities in their greater metropolitan region. If you force urbanites into suburbs, force suburbanites back into cities, and redistribute suburban tax revenue, then presto! You have effectively abolished the suburbs.

Obama’s radical AFFH regulation puts every part of progressives’ “abolish the suburbs” strategy into effect (as I explain in detail here). Once Biden starts to enforce AFFH the way Obama’s administration originally meant it to work, it will be as if America’s suburbs had been swallowed up by the cities they surround. They will lose control of their own zoning and development, they will be pressured into a kind of de facto regional-revenue redistribution, and they will even be forced to start building high-density low-income housing. The latter, of course, will require the elimination of single-family zoning. With that, the basic character of the suburbs will disappear. At the very moment when the pandemic has made people rethink the advantages of dense urban living, the choice of an alternative will be taken away.

That’s all bad enough. But on top of AFFH, Biden now plans to use Cory Booker’s strategy for attacking suburban zoning. AFFH works by holding HUD’s Community Development Block Grants hostage to federal-planning demands. Suburbs won’t be able to get the millions of dollars they’re used to in HUD grants unless they eliminate single-family zoning and densify their business districts. AFFH also forces HUD-grant recipients to sign pledges to “affirmatively further fair housing.” Those pledges could get suburbs sued by civil-rights groups, or by the feds, if they don’t get rid of single-family zoning. The only defense suburbs have against this two-pronged attack is to refuse HUD grants. True, that will effectively redistribute huge amounts of suburban money to cities, but if they give up their HUD grants at least the suburbs will be free of federal control.

The Booker approach — now endorsed by Biden — may block even this way out. Booker wants to hold suburban zoning hostage not only to HUD grants, but to the federal transportation grants used by states to build and repair highways. It may be next to impossible for suburbs to opt out of those state-run highway repairs. Otherwise, suburban roads will deteriorate and suburban access to major arteries will be blocked. AFFH plus the Booker plan will leave America’s suburbs with no alternative but to eliminate their single-family zoning and turn over their planning to the feds. Slowly but surely, suburbs will become helpless satellites of the cities they surround, exactly as progressive urbanists intend.

If America’s suburban voters understood that all this is what Biden and the Democrats have in store for them, it could easily swing the election. That means President Trump now has another “abolish” to add to his list: Joe Biden and the Dems want to abolish America’s suburbs.

There’s just one hitch. Incredibly, although AFFH is arguably Obama’s most radical initiative, Ben Carson’s HUD has still not gotten rid of it. Instead, Carson suspended enforcement of the rule early on and then tinkered around for three years trying to come up with a replacement. What Carson has developed so far is something you might call “AFFH lite.” While this possible replacement removes many of the regulation’s excesses, Carson has so far retained the most egregious feature of AFFH. He still wants to use HUD money to gut suburban single-family zoning. How Carson can even think about taking this stance in the face of President Trump’s explicit directive to reduce and remove excessive federal regulation is a mystery.

It will be very tough for President Trump to make a political issue out of Biden’s housing plans so long as his own cabinet secretary is talking about killing suburban single-family zoning with AFFH. I think Carson’s wobbling on AFFH explains a lot about why Democrats have become so bold with their plans to undo suburban zoning. If even the Trump administration goes along with federal attacks on suburban zoning, the Dems figure they’ve got political cover. Time was when Obama administration officials would turn somersaults to deny that they were going to control suburban-zoning decisions, even when it was obvious that this was their plan. Now, Biden and Booker are remarkably open about their desire to densify the suburbs and get rid of single-family zoning.

The Democrat war on the suburbs is a golden gift to President Trump, but he won’t be able to make use of it until he throws over Carson’s AFFH lite and completely guts Obama’s wildly radical regulation. Then Tump can go to town on Biden and the Dems for making war on the suburbs.

If there were ever proof that Biden has shed his centrism and been taken over by the Left, this is it. Biden got the nomination by declining to endorse the most radical plans of his rivals. But take a look at Biden’s housing plans and it’s clear that he is now a wholly owned subsidiary of the Left. Progressive urbanists’ long-cherished dream of abolishing the suburbs is now within reach. With AFFH restored to its original form by a President Biden, enforced to the hilt, and turbo-charged by the Booker strategy, suburbs as we know them will pass from the scene.

With them will disappear the principle of local control that has been the key to American exceptionalism from the start. Since the Pilgrims first landed, our story has been of a people who chose how and where to live, and who governed themselves when they got there. Self-government in a layered federalist system allowing for local control right down to the township is what made America great. If Biden and the Democrats win, that key to our greatness could easily go by the boards.