Posted on 07/27/2020 11:01:47 AM PDT by Presbyterian Reporter
The Trump administration officially deep-sixed a secretive Obama-era scheme on Friday. That’s more good news for all Americans who appreciate the fundamental right of freedom to associate.
As Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson declared, “President Donald Trump and I agree that the best run communities are the ones run locally. Today, we are tearing down the Obama Administration’s Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule, which was an overreach of unelected Washington bureaucrats into local communities.”
Carson then hit the nail on the head: “The AFFH rule was a ruse for social engineering under the guise of desegregation, essentially turning HUD into a national zoning board.”
It’s no secret that the Left is fond of social engineering, and the AFFH was just that. “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing would radically undercut the political and economic independence of the suburbs,” says Stanley Kurtz, senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. “It would allow bureaucrats in Washington in the Department of Housing and Urban Development to control zoning laws, to control the placement of transportation and business districts, even to some degree the drawing of school districts. In other words, almost every important local governmental responsibility could, under AFFH, fall into the de facto control of the feds.”
Kurtz has been following AFFH for a few years now, and he notes that it grew out of a perversion of an important piece of civil rights legislation from the ‘60s. “The Fair Housing Act (FHA) of 1968,” he wrote in 2016, “was a great achievement, rightly prohibiting discrimination in the sale or rental of housing. President Obama claims that his wildly overreaching Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) regulation … is simply fulfilling the purposes of the original Fair Housing Act. That is nonsense. It’s also a classic case of left-leaning politicians achieving their ends by reading radically new meanings into well-established laws.”
As Paul Mirengoff at Power Line writes, the AFFH “enables the federal government to order more than 1,200 cities and counties that accept any part of annual community development block grants to rezone neighborhoods along income and racial criteria. It thus allows unaccountable federal bureaucrats to dictate who lives where, in order to create racially and economically balanced neighborhoods. It effectively abolishes self-government in the suburbs.”
In addition to weaponizing those vital block grants, Kurtz notes that the Democrats have an even more potent means of coercion, thanks to New Jersey Senator Cory Booker: withholding federal transportation grants for repairing highways — funding that communities simply can’t pass up.
The AFFH sounds like a very consequential policy, no? So why is this the first we’re hearing about it? And why are stories like this one from NPR denouncing President Trump for trafficking in fear while barely even mentioning the AFFH? The answer is that it’s political poison for the Democrats, who hope to ride into office like they did in 2018 — on a swell of support from the suburbs. To those suburbanites, part of the American Dream is being able to own a single-family home in the community of their choice, and to send their kids to the school of their choice. But those goals are at odds with the AFFH, which considers such aspirations greedy, even bigoted.
Kurtz predicts that if the Trump campaign continues to focus on the ills of AFFH, the Biden campaign will lie about it, attack those who raise the issue as promoting white supremacy and white privilege, or ignore it and pretend it doesn’t exist. Or Team Biden will do a bit of all three. But Democrats won’t acknowledge what their plans really are.
And this points to the fundamental dishonesty of the Democrats: They sneak into power using cover and concealment from the Leftmedia, then they seek to implement policies that are often wildly unpopular with a majority of the American people.
If this dismantling of the American Dream is what the Democrats believe in, they should have the guts to say so.
keep spreading the word.
here is the video link to Mark Levin’s interview of Stanley Kurtz last night.
They spent the entire hour discussing the ramifications of AFFH.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boyBfEE1GLM
It was essentially a Federal Homeowner’s Association.................
More details re AFFH here-—
https://www.citizensjournal.us/war-on-the-suburbs-how-huds-housing-policies-became-a-weapon-for-social-change/
War on the Suburbs: How HUD’s Housing Policies Became a Weapon for Social Change
By Sam Jacobs
There are few things more synonymous with the American way of life than the suburbs. While certainly not without problems, the suburbs have been home to middle class Americans since the end of World War 2, and even before. But the suburbs are under attack from certain elements of the left as a source of social inequality and (what else?) “white privilege” and “white supremacy.”
If you are alarmed by this article, that’s a good thing. Because these elements of the American left seek nothing more than the total destruction of your way of life, from the people who live in your communities to the types of houses that you live in to the places where you will be allowed to shop and how you get from one place to another.
The policy is called Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH), but beyond this specific HUD policy, there’s a philosophical and political attack on suburbs that goes well in excess of any single policy. There is, without mincing words, a War on the Suburbs in America. It is a war not against a geographical location or a type of housing or community, but an attack on a way of life.
Table of Contents
What Is Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing?
How Did the War on the Suburbs Start?
Safe Streets Are a Form of White Privilege
The Battle for Single-Family Housing
The Sad Tale of Ferguson
Beyond the Single-Family Housing Unit
This was a stealth move by the Obama administration “
And this nation killing wrecking ball will remain stealth until after the election. There are so many great things Trump has done that he gets no credit for. The Never Trump a-holes helping the Rats are fine with the destruction of the middle class is fine as long as they can get rid that bad man Mr. Trump. Every time l see one of those lying Lincoln Project ads it’s all l can do not to rip TV off the wall.
“””It was essentially a Federal Homeowner’s Association..............”””
According to Levin and Kurtz, AFFH goes far beyond housing. It would override transportation, zoning, taxation, commerce, schooling, and other decisions now made by cities and counties.
I had heard about this, but I didn’t realize this was still in effect.
Go TRUMP!
Carson on scrapping Obama-era housing rule: We don’t need layers of bureaucracy telling Americans how to live
HUD Secretary Ben Carson joins Jason Chaffetz with insight on ‘Hannity.’
This is an excellent move—but it will only last as long as Republicans (and steadfast conservatives at that) control the White House.
Therefore it is _very_ important that exurban and rural communities do not fund any extensions of city water or water treatment.
Don’t do it.
Without those extensions it is impossible for the lefties to create slums in your area—it is too expensive.
We should never get over-confident.
Reminds me of that insurance commercial where the HOA compliance rep is going around cutting down peoples mailbox for being 2” over height rule, cutting down a woman’s hanging planters, not allowed in front, etc...............
Biden’s Housing Plan Would Destroy Suburban Communities
He wants to push people into cities.
Louis DeBroux · Jul. 8, 2020
At a time when a growing number of Americans are fleeing crowded cities, Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden is quietly working to force them back in. He’s working to push suburbanites back into the city as well.
As the COVID-19 pandemic has unfolded, countless Americans in places like New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago have come to the realization that cramming millions of people into a small geographical area, living on top of one another, and traveling to and from work packed in long metal tubes may not be the glamorous existence they once believed.
In fact, many are moving to the suburbs, which they mocked up until only recently. This exodus has only accelerated as Americans have watched in shock and horror as violent mobs literally take over sections of cities, shut down traffic, set businesses ablaze, drag people from their cars and beat them, march through neighborhoods threatening to harm people, and, in a growing number of cases, kill innocent people whose only offense was being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Even worse, they’ve seen Democrat elected officials respond with either apathy or praise for the criminals.
But Joe Biden not only wants to block the exodus to the suburbs, he wants to annex the suburbs back into the cities using taxes and regulations. The mechanism for doing that is full enforcement and expansion of Barack Obama’s radical Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) regulation, which would effectively end single-family-home neighborhoods.
This is part of what Biden was referring to when he recently tweeted, “We’re going to beat Donald Trump. And when we do, we won’t just rebuild this nation — we’ll transform it.”
Yes, Mark Levin’s Show last night is a much watch for all.
why did it take 3 years?
why did it take 3 years?
1. government bureaucracy
2. Carson needed time to develop a legal strategy to rebut the almost certain challenge by some Obama Judge.
3. those are a couple of reasons—likely more.
THAT Ad could be parodied into a Govt control ad
Part of obama’s fundamental transformation.
the legal strategy is: the Constitution does not allow the federal government to do it in the first place. Trump could have done this 3 years ago on this basis.
“I see you met Cynthia!”
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