Trump Finally Ends Obama-Era Suburb Rules

This week, President Trump and Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Ben Carson ended the Obama-Biden administration’s Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) rule.

AFFH was a wildly radical regulation that built on the 1968 Fair Housing Act, which outlawed selling or renting a house to any person due to race, color, religion or national origin. According to Stanley Kurtz at National Review, there was no basis for the Obama-era regulation in the 1968 law, and that the original law clearly was not meant to have seemingly random meanings attached overtime, such as “economic integration, hyper-dense ‘transit oriented development,’ hostility to automobiles in the name of global warming, regional (rather than local) governance, and more.”

AFFH, as written by Betsy McCaughey this week, is really a “social engineering scheme,” and it would be brought back should Democrat Joe Biden win the presidency in November.

McCaughey writes:

“Biden’s plan is to force suburban towns with single-family homes and minimum lot sizes to build high-density affordable housing smack in the middle of their leafy neighborhoods.

“Starting in 2015, Obama’s Department of Housing and Urban Development bureaucrats imposed a cookie-cutter requirement ‘balanced housing’ in every suburb. ‘Balanced’ meant affordable even for people who need federal vouchers. Towns were obligated to ‘do more than simply not discriminate.’ As HUD’s 2013 proposal explained, towns had to make it possible for low-income minorities to choose suburban living and provide ‘adequate support to make their choices possible.’

“Towns had to scrap zoning, build bigger water and sewer lines to support high-density living, expand schools and social services and add mass transit. All pushing up local taxes. Towns that refused would lose their federal aid.”

The AFFH rule is nothing less than a shakedown of the suburbs by the far-Left in an effort to expand their power over them. As President Trump said in a Rose Garden press conference last week, Biden would “totally destroy the beautiful suburbs” by “placing far-left Washington bureaucrats in charge of local zoning.”

The Left, of course, accused Trump of racism for saying this, but it’s nothing of the sort. Anyone can live in the suburbs (or anywhere for that matter) should they be able to afford it. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that residents of neighborhoods with half-acre, single-family zoning probably don’t want massive public housing complexes there.

The AFFH rule is, in the end, a Marxist-style idea that no matter who can afford to get out of a dense city and make a life for themselves that they want to, no one should be afforded that right unless everyone has it. It also implies that localities should not be able to make the best decisions for themselves, but that they should be dictated to from an aloof, centralized bureaucracy in D.C.

And that’s what the Left wants for every policy issue. The solution is always a centralized powerful government, with the citizen unable to make his or her own life decisions. As such, we can never allow these people into power.