In this Wall Street Journal op-ed, President Trump and HUD Secretary Carson defend their decision to deep six the Obama administration’s Affirmative Furthering Fair Housing rule (AFFH). They write:
The crime and chaos in Democrat-run cities have gotten so bad that liberals are even getting out of Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Rather than rethink their destructive policies, the left wants to make sure there is no escape. The plan is to remake the suburbs in their image so they resemble the dysfunctional cities they now govern. As usual, anyone who dares tell the truth about what the left is doing is smeared as a racist.
We won’t allow this to happen. That’s why we stopped the last administration’s radical social-engineering project that would have transformed the suburbs from the top down.
Trump and Carson explain that AFFH empowered ideologically-driven bureaucrats to “abolish single-family zoning, compel the construction of high-density ‘stack and pack’ apartment buildings in residential neighborhoods, and forcibly transform neighborhoods across America so they look and feel the way [they] think they should.”
The President and the Secretary cite the treatment of Westchester County, New York, which we discussed here (among other places), as an example of what AFFH means for the nation’s suburbs. The fact that Westchester County was never found guilty of housing discrimination, and indeed that such discrimination was never even alleged, shows that AFFH wasn’t about ending housing discrimination. As Stanley Kurtz says, “AFFH was — and remains — a massive social-engineering plan designed to tell Americans where and how to live.”
Trump and Carson also cite the decisions by Portland, Oregon and Minneapolis to abolish single-family zoning. These developments confirm that (to quote Kurtz again), an anti-suburban revolution is high on the Democrats’ wish list.
Democrats have responded to the revocation of AFFH not by engaging on substance, but by alleging that the decision by Trump and his distinguished African-American HUD Secretary is racist. Fortunately, this mindless claim hasn’t deterred the president. The Wall Street Journal editorial shows his determination to engage in a substantive discussion on the vital matter of the Democratic party’s plans to regulate suburbs, in the low density form in which White, Blacks, and others enjoy them, out of existence.
