President Trump announced overnight that he is considering doing away with a federal rule designed to overcome historic patterns of segregation.
“At the request of many great Americans who live in the Suburbs, and others, I am studying the AFFH housing regulation that is having a devastating impact on these once thriving Suburban areas. Corrupt Joe Biden wants to make them MUCH WORSE. Not fair to homeowners, I may END!” the President Tweeted Tuesday night.
The president, a real estate developer, provided no other context about why he was talking about the AFFH, though National Review published a column Tuesday saying “Joe Biden and the Democrats want to abolish America’s suburbs.”
“Biden and his party have embraced yet another dream of the radical Left: a federal takeover, transformation, and de facto urbanization of America’s suburbs,” Stanley Kurtz wrote. “What’s more, Biden just might be able to pull off this `fundamental transformation.’”
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Part of the Fair Housing Act, the Obama-era affirmatively further fair housing (AFFH) rule “sets out a framework for local governments, States, and public housing agencies to take meaningful actions to overcome historic patterns of segregation, promote fair housing choice, and foster inclusive communities that are free from discrimination,” according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Under the AFFH rule, HUD provides a Far Housing AFH Assessment Tool, “which includes instructions and data provided by HUD, consists of a series of questions designed to help program participants identify, among other things, fair housing issues pertaining to patterns of integration and segregation; racially and ethnically concentrated areas of poverty; disparities in access to opportunity; and disproportionate housing needs, as well as the contributing factors for those issues.”
Kurtz writes that Biden would “enforce the Obama administration’s radical AFFH (Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing) regulation to the hilt.”
“Obama’s radical AFFH regulation puts every part of progressives’ `abolish the suburbs’ strategy into effect (as I explain in detail here). Once Biden starts to enforce AFFH the way Obama’s administration originally meant it to work, it will be as if America’s suburbs had been swallowed up by the cities they surround. They will lose control of their own zoning and development, they will be pressured into a kind of de facto regional-revenue redistribution, and they will even be forced to start building high-density low-income housing,” according to Kurtz.