Donald Trump Proposes End to Obama’s Suburb-Killing Forced Housing Rules

Obama
Nicholas Kamm/AFP
Warner Todd Huston

President Donald Trump is one step closer to putting an end to Barack Obama’s disastrous housing rules that would give the federal government full control of how suburban homes are built, where they are built, and who is allowed to live in them.

Just before he walked out of the White House door for the last time, Obama’s administration passed regulations with the Orwellian title of the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) rule. The plan would give the federal government full control of what sort of houses are built in every American community, in part by requiring a certain amount of low-income housing to be part of every suburban subdivision.

The rule would also essentially outlaw the single-family home as a means to force multi-family residences so that Washington could flood every community with immigrants, refugees, or anyone they feel should be injected into any particular community.

This rule was approved before Obama left office but had not yet been implemented when the Trump administration took over. And since Dr. Ben Carson took over as housing secretary, the rule has been purposefully delayed. Still, it is an official rule, and if the administration does not formally strike it off the books, it will have to go into effect sooner or later.

For the last several weeks, Trump has been targeting this rule and saying he intends to eliminate it from the Housing and Urban Development rule book.

Last week, the president mentioned that Biden and the Democrats want to “abolish the suburbs”:

Now, in a more formal address, Trump announced that his administration is moving forward to eliminate the AFFH rule.

During his remarks last Thursday, the president targeted the disastrous Obama rule.

“The Democrats in D.C. have been and want to, at a much higher level, abolish our beautiful and successful suburbs by placing far-left Washington bureaucrats in charge of local zoning decisions,” Trump said on the White House South Lawn. “They are absolutely determined to eliminate single-family zoning, destroy the value of houses and communities already built, just as they have in Minneapolis and other locations that you read about today. Your home will go down in value, and crime rates will rapidly rise.”

Trump continued:

Joe Biden and his bosses from the radical left want to significantly multiply what they’re doing now. And what will be the end result is you will totally destroy the beautiful suburbs. Suburbia will be no longer as we know it. So, they wanted to defund and abolish your police and law enforcement while at the same time destroying our great suburbs.

“The suburb destruction will end with us,” the president said, adding:

Next week, I will be discussing the AFFH rule — AFFH rule, a disaster — and our plans to protect the suburbs from being obliterated by Washington Democrats, by people on the far left that want to see the suburbs destroyed, that don’t care. People have worked all their lives to get into a community, and now they’re going to watch it go to hell. Not going to happen, not while I’m here.

The AFFH rule is a bald-faced federal government takeover of every community. By using its power to approve banking and funding, the federal government would have the ability to tell suburban areas who will be allowed to live in their neighborhoods and what kind of homes they can build to force immigrant and low-income residents into every neighborhood. In the end, the rule would destroy wealth and lower property values. It would also tend to undermine any bastion of conservative voters by injecting government-dependent voters into every single American community.

Ending this rule is a welcome idea to those who imagine that the federal government should not be telling people how to build their communities.

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