Posted on 01/14/2016 4:51:31 AM PST by massmike
Welcome to the world of “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing†(AFFH), Obama’s transformative new regulation. How will AFFH work? The city of Dubuque gives us one of our best and most frightening previews yet.
An account of Dubuque as a forerunner of a post-AFFH world comes to us courtesy of a stunning report by Deborah Thornton, a policy analyst for Iowa’s Public Interest Institute. The report tells the story of how Dubuque was pressured to cede large swathes of its governing authority to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which has forced the city to direct its limited low-income “Section 8†housing resources, not to its own needy citizens, but to voucher-holders from Chicago.
[B]y effectively treating Dubuque and Chicago as part of the same “region,†HUD was able to declare Dubuque’s low-income housing point system discriminatory. Since the vast majority of Section 8 applicants from Chicago were African-Americans, Dubuque’s preferences for citizens of its own city, county, and state were deemed racist.
Under HUD’s detailed oversight, Dubuque must now actively recruit Section 8 voucher holders from the Chicago area. In fact, as of January 2015, the percentage of African-American voucher users in Dubuque was larger than the percentage of African-Americans living in Chicago. The problem is that very few of these new public housing residents have ever lived or paid taxes in Dubuque, or even Iowa. The feds have essentially commandeered Dubuque to solve Chicago’s public housing shortage.
Having previously accepted HUD funding through the Housing Choice Voucher (Section 8) program, as well as HUD’s Community Development Block Grant program, Dubuque was formally obligated to “affirmatively further fair housing†in whatever way HUD defined that obligation. Refusal to submit to HUD’s dictates would have led to the withdrawal of federal funding, a lawsuit for supposed discrimination, or both.
(Excerpt) Read more at nationalreview.com ...
There are towns in the surrounding area, of several hundred miles outside of Chicago, that have suffered the same fate as Dubuque. Relocating the Chicago housing project residents into smaller, ‘whiter’ towns has seen crime spike in those previously ‘safe’ small towns.
I have been re-watching the 1965 Dr. Zhivago of late, and I was struck by the scene where Yuri returns from his medical service in WWI, to discover that his FIL's Moscow mansion has been taken over by 13 families, leaving his family one larger upstairs room.
Bolshevik woman: "There was living space for 13 families in this one house."
Yuri: "Yes. This is a better arrangement, comrades. More just."
Barring a second American Reformation, we may be having to speak this way soon, and our children will certainly have to.
This is also happening in Rockford, IL which is between Chicago and Dubuque.
Hey, they’re just sharing the misery, comrades. We’re importing poverty from every hellhole in the world, why not move around some of our homegrown poverty so smaller communities can experience the benefits of diversity?
instead of having a central collection point for garbage i.e. dump ,I’ve got a better idea; scatter it all over uniformily.
Is Chicago's public housing system a destructive, stinking mess that undermines and corrupts the people it is supposed to help? Yes.
Should we tear down the projects? Yes.
Should we be seeking ways to break up concentrations of poverty, which entails (hold onto your hats here, suburban NIMBY cowboys) poor people moving to scattered site housing and new communities with better opportunities? Yes.
Will this have racial correlates that might be rather obvious in mostly white small towns and suburbs? Yes.
We all know that the massive over-concentration of the poor in federally financed hellholes is a bad idea. Doesn't work in the Gaza Strip, where the UN does the financing. Doesn't work on Indian reservations. Doesn't work in Chicago. But where should these people go? They are, frequently, not just poor; they are very likely carriers of various social plagues. The fact is, no one wants them, except ghetto based politicos and social services workers, for whom they are paychecks. Of those displaced, some will do well with a geographical cure leading to a job and good schools for their kids. But some have gone feral and pose a multi-generational task of re-civilizing. That's the problem being dumped on Dubuque, and other places, by HUD.
The HUD program is anti-democratic. Its language is predictably Orwellian. This is not about "Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing." Dumping someone else's problems on communities that had nothing to do with creating the problems in the first place is not "fairness." A true label would be "Undoing the Stupidities of the Great Society," or perhaps "Dilution is the Solution: Dispersing the Urban Underclass." But how?
I'd begin by turning housing assistance funds into vouchers and telling recipients to find their own housing on the open market. (No Section 8, which involves identifying participating housing units, which creates a fixed site problem.) And I'd work with social service professionals in the non-profit world as well as government to help them address the mobility issues that cripple so many of the poor. Last but not least, I'd look for incentives that encouraged businesses and distant communities to voluntary accept a reasonable (as defined by them) number of transplants, through appropriate zoning for moderate priced housing and hiring programs.
Mobility is a key. Middle class kids go to college and four years later (or five or six ...) end up all over the country. They are mobile, and are quite likely to relocate several times over their careers. Kids who go into the military are the same. Kids in the skilled trades are perhaps culturally less mobile, but they have skills that are easily transferable, and they can move if they need/want to.
Immobility rooted in lack of skills and lack of a broad social network is one of the salient features of the underclass. It is a problem that we should be willing to address. But the way HUD is going about it is underhanded, authoritarian, and illegitimate. As long as HUD is smash-mouthed about this, as far as I'm concerned, we should locate a Section 8 property next door to every HUD employee at GS 9 and above, every Obama political appointee, and every Democratic congressman. If Annandale and Arlington, VA, don't like it, tough noogies.
Dilution is the solution. I recall a conversation years ago with a wise older man, one of the community leaders in the town in which I was raised. We were solving all the problems of the world, and services for the retarded came up. A neighboring community had an activist leadership group that was busily program building, and in the process turning that town into the retardation capital of the tri-state region. Not good.
A sheltered workshop is fine. Too many in a concentrated area is bad. Businesses that hire the handicapped are great. Compelling them to do so is not. My local grocery has a couple of "special" employees. They've been there for years. The rest of the staff watches out for them, and steps in quickly if interactions with the public go south. (I'm talking about autistic spectrum reactions, not anger management issues or criminal behavior.) I give the store great credit for making a place for at least of few of these needy folks.
The broader underclass issues are tougher. Our social services programs subsidize, encourage, and perpetuate bad behavior. They have also tended to concentrate is geographically. It is a natural tendency to want to avoid such areas. But when avoidance is coupled with restrictive zoning and occupancy regulations to prevent "those people" from invading "our" safe communities, avoidance slips into quarantine.
In the long run, the great urban concentrations of poverty need to be busted up. That's an all-front war. What HUD is doing here is seeking a shortcut, through illegitimate means.
I left out my older friend’s solution to the retardation capital issue: “Every community should take care of it’s own.” That’s true. Very small communities may not have critical mass to employ the support professionals and programs that may be needed, but most of us don’t live in very small communities. We live in communities that are big enough to take care of their own.
The Republican nominee has only won once since 1984 (Bush in 2004 by less than 10,000 votes), but Clinton in 1992 and Gore in 2000 carried the state with under 50% of the vote. Gore's margin was only about 4,000 votes (so probably fewer than the margin of ballot-stuffing).
Dubuque has not shown much sense in its voting habits. It has not voted Republican for President since 1956. Even Chicago/Cook County has voted GOP more recently (1972). They reap what they sow.
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