Poverty Pervades The Suburbs

[Ryan Ruck]

Yep, pretty much...

[Ryan Ruck]

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:

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.

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

[Ryan Ruck]

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.

[Ryan Ruck]

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.

[American Patriot]

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

[Ryan Ruck]

Bingo!

[American Patriot]

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.

[Ryan Ruck]

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.