Tag Archives: Suburbs

Bye-bye ‘Burbs: Biden Plan to Create ‘Affordable, Multifamily Housing’ in the Suburbs Will Kill the American Dream, by Robert Bridge

People have been escaping deteriorating inner cities for the suburbs for decades. Now Biden wants to bring the deteriorating inner cities to the suburbs. From Robert Bridge at strategic-culture.com:

If the elite coastal liberals think for one moment that their swanky communities are immune from woke rage, they better think again.

Hidden away inside of Joe Biden’s ambitious Job Plan is a proposal to eliminate so-called “exclusionary zoning” laws, which the Democrats now equate with “economic injustice” and, yes, even racism. In other words, the right to raise a family in a peaceful neighborhood beyond the bustle of the city is yet another symptom of ‘white privilege’ that appears to be heading for cancel culture’s busy chopping block.

Despite the stultifying conformity and crushing boredom typically associated with suburban living, perhaps best exemplified in the 1999 black comedy-drama American Beauty, this out-of-town living arrangement continues to define for many citizens the very essence of the American Dream. Beyond the hazy city limits, the grass does appear greener, the air cleaner and the schools better. But why should those attractive perks be the sole preserve of that pale-face tribe of Americans known as white people, silently suffering, as critical race theory explains, from an apparently incurable genetic defect known as ‘racism’? Another question might be, if white people are such repugnant natural born bigots, why would anyone wish to live near them in the first place?

That question is never addressed in U.S. President Joe Biden’s longwinded and exorbitant Job Plan, where, aside from pledging to fix America’s dilapidated infrastructure and growing the economy, a plan to radically remake the suburbs in the name of “diversity, equity and inclusion” has been quietly slipped in as well.

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Soccer moms might turn on Biden if they learn he’s attacking their homes, by Andrea Widburg

Nobody scrimps and saves to buy a house in a nice suburban neighborhood in the hopes that their neighbors will be  Section 8, low-income multifamily housing. From Andrea Widburg at americanthinker.com:

Stanley Kurtz noted that part of Biden’s alleged “infrastructure” bill continues the left’s war on the suburbs.  Even though affluent suburbs are increasingly filled with Democrat voters (college grads who passed through the propaganda mill), the administration wants to make them more densely urban because that ensures reliable Dem voting.  However, if Republicans can get the word out about this feature in the bill, they might get an unexpected ally: soccer moms.

First, let me share some of Kurtz’s analysis with you, although I urge you to read the whole thing:

How, exactly, does Biden plan to end single-family zoning? According to the fact sheet released by the White House, “Biden is calling on Congress to enact an innovative new competitive grant program that awards flexible and attractive funding to jurisdictions that take concrete steps to eliminate [‘exclusionary zoning’].” In other words, Biden wants to use a big pot of federal grant money as bait. If a county or municipality agrees to weaken or eliminate its single-family zoning, it gets the federal bucks.

The wildly overreaching Obama-Biden era Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) regulation — which Biden has pledged to revive — works in a similar fashion. The difference is that by adding another gigantic pot of federal money to the Community Development Block Grants that are the lure of AFFH, Biden makes it that much harder for suburbs to resist applying — and that much more punishing to jurisdictions that forgo a share of the federal taxes they’ve already paid so as to protect their right to self-rule.

The practical effect of ending single-family zoning means that you just bought a lovely three-bedroom, two-bathroom home for your growing family, on a quiet street with large lots, each boasting a big garden.  It’s the perfect place to play.  However, when your neighbors move out, a developer buys his property, razes it, and builds a Section 8 multifamily unit on it.  When this happens a few more times, you just overpaid for a large home on a busy street, complete with Section 8 housing — and the drugs and crime that inevitably follow when Section 8 comes to your neighborhood.

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Self-Defense and ‘Taking the Law into Your Own Hands.’ By Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

Is there a free market alternative to the protection, or lack thereof, offered by today’s police departments? From Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr. at lewrockwell.com:

The riots in Louisville are only the latest in a long string of violent, raging mob riots by the criminal Marxist BLM movement, their mostly-white “antifa” thuggish allies, and assorted looters. In this case, “Two police officers have been shot in Louisville, Ky., amid riots following the announcement of an indictment in the shooting of Breonna Taylor. Louisville chief of police Robert Schroeder confirmed that the officers were shot and were taken to a local hospital. Schroeder told reporters that one of the officers was undergoing surgery but in stable condition, while the other was alert and stable. Police have arrested one suspect in the shooting. . . after a grand jury charged just one of the officers involved in the shooting of Taylor in a botched drug bust. Rioters clashed with police throughout Louisville, burning trash cans and calling to defund the city police department.”

Last May, hundreds of businesses in the state’s Twin Cities — Minneapolis and St. Paul — were damaged or looted during four days of unrest. In Los Angeles, “National Guard troops arrived in the nation’s second-largest city overnight after a fourth day of protests Saturday saw demonstrators clash repeatedly with officers, torch police vehicles and pillage businesses. Mayor Eric Garcetti said he asked Gov. Gavin Newsom for 500 to 700 members of the Guard to assist the 10,000 Los Angeles Police Department officers. The California National Guard is being deployed to Los Angeles overnight to support our local response to maintain peace and safety on the streets of our city,’ said the mayor, who ordered a rare citywide curfew until Sunday morning. Firefighters responded to dozens of fires, and scores of businesses were damaged. One of the hardest-hit areas was the area around the Grove, a popular high-end outdoor mall west of downtown where hundreds of protesters swarmed the area, showering police with rocks and other objects and vandalizing shops. About 3,000 protesters demonstrated in Brooklyn, and were pushed back by NYPD officers releasing chemical mace after the protests turned violent. A woman was arrested and charged with attempted murder after she threw a Molotov cocktail into an occupied police car.

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Attention America’s Suburbs: You Have Just Been Annexed, by Stanley Kurtz

If you have not heard about President Obama’s Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Regulations (SLL had not) it’s time to bring yourself up to speed. These regulations that my have as wide reaching and pernicious impact as Obamacare. From Stanley Kurtz, via a guest post on theburningplatform.com:

It’s difficult to say what’s more striking about President Obama’s Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) regulation:its breathtaking radicalism, the refusal of the press to cover it, or its potential political ramifications. The danger AFFH poses to Democrats explains why the press barely mentions it. This lack of curiosity, in turn, explains why the revolutionary nature of the rule has not been properly understood. Ultimately, the regulation amounts to back-door annexation, a way of turning America’s suburbs into tributaries of nearby cities.

This has been Obama’s purpose from the start. In Spreading the Wealth: How Obama Is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities, I explain how a young Barack Obama turned against the suburbs and threw in his lot with a group of Alinsky-style community organizers who blamed suburban tax-flight for urban decay. Their bible was Cities Without Suburbs, by former Albuquerque mayor David Rusk. Rusk, who works closely with Obama’s Alinskyite mentors and now advises the Obama administration, initially called on cities to annex their surrounding suburbs. When it became clear that outright annexation was a political non-starter, Rusk and his followers settled on a series of measures designed to achieve de facto annexation over time.

The plan has three elements: 1) Inhibit suburban growth, and when possible encourage suburban re-migration to cities. This can be achieved, for example, through regional growth boundaries (as in Portland), or by relative neglect of highway-building and repair in favor of public transportation. 2) Force the urban poor into the suburbs through the imposition of low-income housing quotas. 3) Institute “regional tax-base sharing,” where a state forces upper-middle-class suburbs to transfer tax revenue to nearby cities and less-well-off inner-ring suburbs (as in Minneapolis/St. Paul).

If you press suburbanites into cities, transfer urbanites to the suburbs, and redistribute suburban tax money to cities, you have effectively abolished the suburbs. For all practical purposes, the suburbs would then be co-opted into a single metropolitan region. Advocates of these policy prescriptions call themselves “regionalists.”

AFFH goes a long way toward achieving the regionalist program of Obama and his organizing mentors. In significant measure, the rule amounts to a de facto regional annexation of America’s suburbs. To see why, let’s have a look at the rule.

To continue reading: Attention America’s Suburbs