Massive Government Overreach: Obama’s AFFH Rule Is Out
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.
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