President Trump on Wednesday again warned about low-income housing “invading” suburban neighborhoods if Joe Biden is elected president, repeating a theme he has brought up in recent weeks.
The president tweeted: “The “suburban housewife” will be voting for me. They want safety & are thrilled that I ended the long running program where low income housing would invade their neighborhood. Biden would reinstall it, in a bigger form, with Corey Booker in charge! @foxandfriends @MariaBartiromo”
Last month, Trump rescinded President Obama’s Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) rule, which Trump said, “took away decision-making from local communities.”
Part of the Fair Housing Act, the AFFH rule under Obama was designed to “set 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 old 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.”
A Trump Administration fact sheet on the president’s action says, “This action ends the Federal encroachment on local communities that threatened our nation’s suburbs. The Obama Administration’s original AFFH rule attempted to take local zoning decisions out of the hands of local communities.”
It also claims “AFFH would have imposed a massive regulatory burden on localities, required high density zoning, eliminated single family zoning, and destroyed our suburbs. This overregulation of our suburbs would have harmed Americans’ abilities to work, buy homes, and build lives for their families, including many minority communities.”