Time for Congress to defund Obama’s
racial zoning quotas, By Robert Romano
The omnibus spending bill for the
remainder of Fiscal Year 2016 is upon us — funding for the so-called
discretionary portion of the federal government runs out on Dec. 11 — and that
means there is another opportunity for Congress to assert its constitutional
power of the purse.
One defund House and Senate leaders
might look at is an
amendment to the Transportation and HUD appropriations bill by Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) defunding implementation of a
Department of Housing and Urban Development regulation, “Affirmatively
Furthering Fair Housing.”
The
rule conditions eligibility for community development block grants upon compliance with the rule — which on its face will
require redrawing zoning maps to achieve racial and income integration when a
municipality is merely accused by HUD of not being in compliance. In
2014, HUD
dispersed about $3.4 billion of these grants to
about 1,200
counties and cities.
The rule has raised so much concern
among local planners that Rep. Mia Love (R-Utah), a former mayor of Saratoga
Springs, Utah, appealed to HUD Secretary Julian Castro, a former mayor of San
Antonio, Texas, saying at a
House Financial Services Committee hearing earlier this year, “I know that as a mayor you wouldn’t want the federal
government coming in to tell you what to do with your zoning laws and with your
rules because you have more skin in the game. You have more of an incentive to
take care of the people that live in your areas. You’re the boots on the
ground.”
To which, Castro assured Love, “This
is not about changing zoning laws, planning laws — anything like that.” It
isn’t? It sure does appear the rule affects
changes to local zoning ordinances — since it says so.
Specifically, it does so by
directing program participants including municipalities “to examine relevant
factors, such as zoning and other land-use practices that are likely
contributors to fair housing concerns, and take appropriate actions in
response.”
HUD
has also proposed the “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Assessment Tool” “for use by each program participant to evaluate fair
housing choice in its jurisdiction, to identify barriers to fair housing choice
at the local and regional levels, and to set and prioritize fair housing goals
to overcome such barriers and advance fair housing choice.”
In preparation for implementing the
regulation, HUD has released template
racial rezoning maps and data
tables to be used in each community
development block grant recipient area.
The
tool’s worksheet orders the assessing bureaucrat
using the maps and data to “identify neighborhoods or areas in the jurisdiction
and region where racial/ethnic groups are segregated and indicate the
predominant groups for each.”
Additionally, the bureaucrat must
identify the extent the following factors “contribut[e] to segregated housing
patterns” including “Land use and zoning laws, such as minimum lot sizes,
limits on multi-unit properties, height limits, or bedroom-number limits as
well as requirements for special use permits; Occupancy restrictions;
Residential real estate steering; Patterns of community opposition; Economic
pressures, such as increased rents or land and development costs; Major private
investments; Municipal or State services and amenities; and Foreclosure
patterns.”
The program needs to be defunded.
The Department of Housing and Urban
Development does not even want Congress to know what it is really happening
with its racial and income zoning quotas that Secretary Castro is willing to go
on the record with erroneous information about the rule in testimony before
relevant committees. Rep. Love deserves credit for exposing what amounts to a
cover-up by Castro.
Defunding “Affirmatively Furthering
Fair Housing” should be easy for House and Senate leaders to get done,
particularly given the Department’s attempts to mislead Congress about what the
regulation does.
This is a battle that can be won.
President Barack Obama is not going to shut the government down over a
provision almost nobody has even heard of, and even if he did, the politics for
Democrats on this issue are abysmal.
The administration’s only argument
would have to be that when many Americans purchased or rented their homes, they
were fundamentally racist in their decision because they chose to live in a
nice neighborhood.
In the meantime, individual, real
cases of housing discrimination have been illegal for nearly 50 years. Zoning
determines what can be built where, not who gets to live there. Those decisions
are made by individuals when they purchase or rent in the real estate market,
and are subject to what can afforded and proximity to work, economic factors
mostly that government cannot affect by changes to local zoning ordinances.
Not everyone gets to live in nice
neighborhoods, and Congress must not be funding regulations that empower the
Obama administration to redraw every neighborhood in America according to its
utopian vision — especially when the administration is lying about it to
Congress. This is as out-of-control as the federal government has ever been,
and almost nothing of local government will remain if this regulation stays in
effect. It’s that bad.
Robert Romano is the senior editor
of Americans for Limited Government.
http://netrightdaily.com/2015/12/time-for-congress-to-defund-obamas-racial-zoning-quotas/
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