Senate showdown on federal takeover of neighborhoods, by Rick Manning
The Senate is voting on whether to
rein in President Obama’s outlandish regulation that uses $3 billion community development block
grant money to coerce 1,200 recipient cities and counties
nationwide to submit local zoning plans to the
Department of Housing and Urbana Development (HUD) to redress imagined
discrimination based upon neighborhoods’ racial and income make-up.
Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) has an amendment that would actually prohibit this implementation of the
Affirmative Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) regulation, specifically stopping
HUD from attaching zoning changes as a condition for receiving funding, and it
deserves every senator’s support.
According to the Federal Register, AFFH directs 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” as a condition
for receipt of the block grants. It’s right there in the regulation.
On the other hand, Sen. Susan
Collins (R-Maine) offers an amendment which merely reiterates current law that the federal
government cannot compel the local zoning changes, stating no funds can be used
“to direct a grantee to undertake specific changes to existing zoning laws.”
As noted by the National Review’s Stanley
Kurtz, “Federal law already forbids HUD
from mandating the spending priorities of state and local governments or
forcing grant recipients to forgo their duly adopted policies or laws,
including zoning laws. AFFH gets around this prohibition by setting up a
situation in which a locality can’t get any federal grant money unless it
‘voluntarily’ promises to change its zoning laws and change its housing
policies in exactly the way HUD wants.”
Kurtz emphasizes the point: “This
trick allows HUD to avoid formally ‘directing’ localities to do anything at all
in order to get their HUD grants. But HUD gives localities plenty of informal
‘guidance’ that makes it perfectly clear what they actually have to do to get
their federal grants.”
Therefore, even with the Collins
amendment, AFFH will still require 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” as a condition
for receipt of the block grants.
This is an attempt by the Senate to
pretend to have acted to stop the federalization of local zoning decisions
without actually doing so. The Lee amendment will remove the local zoning
strings attached to the funding, plain and simple. The Collins amendment will
not.
It is telling that President Obama
is threatening a veto of an appropriations bill that has “ideological” content,
when the President himself is exercising the power of the purse to compel his
ideological vision on our nation’s cities, towns and counties through
implementation of AFFH.
The Collins amendment, ironically,
will enable and advance this ideological agenda — while offering constituents
false comfort that it has been abated when it has not. Only the Lee amendment
can stop this HUD driven transformation of our neighborhoods.
The House has already passed the Lee
language twice with vocal support from across the Conference ranging from
Representatives Paul Gosar to Peter King. Americans for Limited Government
urges every senator to vote yes on the Lee amendment to the Transportation-HUD
appropriations bill — and stop the federalization of local zoning policies once
and for all.
Rick Manning is the President of
Americans for Limited Government.
No comments:
Post a Comment