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 mono-racial 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. —
Stanley Kurtz is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public
Policy Center. He can be reached at comments.kurtz@nationalreview.com /*
Source:http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/420896/massive-government-overreach-obamas-affh-rule-out-stanley-kurtz
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