At a time when a growing number of Americans are fleeing crowded cities, Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden is quietly working to force them back in. He’s working to push suburbanites back into the city as well.

As the COVID-19 pandemic has unfolded, countless Americans in places like New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago have come to the realization that cramming millions of people into a small geographical area, living on top of one another, and traveling to and from work packed in long metal tubes may not be the glamorous existence they once believed.

In fact, many are moving to the suburbs, which they mocked up until only recently. This exodus has only accelerated as Americans have watched in shock and horror as violent mobs literally take over sections of cities, shut down traffic, set businesses ablaze, drag people from their cars and beat them, march through neighborhoods threatening to harm people, and, in a growing number of cases, kill innocent people whose only offense was being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Even worse, they’ve seen Democrat elected officials respond with either apathy or praise for the criminals.

But Joe Biden not only wants to block the exodus to the suburbs, he wants to annex the suburbs back into the cities using taxes and regulations. The mechanism for doing that is full enforcement and expansion of Barack Obama’s radical Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) regulation, which would effectively end single-family-home neighborhoods.

This is part of what Biden was referring to when he recently tweeted, “We’re going to beat Donald Trump. And when we do, we won’t just rebuild this nation — we’ll transform it.”

As National Review’s Stanley Kurtz explains, “This de facto annexation strategy had three parts: (1) use a kind of quota system to force ‘economic integration’ on the suburbs, pushing urban residents outside of the city; (2) close down suburban growth by regulating development, restricting automobile use, and limiting highway growth and repair, thus forcing would-be suburbanites back to the city; (3) use state and federal laws to force suburbs to redistribute tax revenue to poorer cities in their greater metropolitan region. If you force urbanites into suburbs, force suburbanites back into cities, and redistribute suburban tax revenue, then presto! You have effectively abolished the suburbs.”

Kurtz further warns, “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. The latter, of course, will require the elimination of single-family zoning.”

Under pressure from the vast federal bureaucracy and a mountain of regulations, this “transformation” will be nearly impossible to resist. Cities qualify for Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Community Development Block (CDB) Grants funding by agreeing to the strings attached to the grants.

But even if cities are able to resist the allure of the millions in CDB grants, declining the funds in exchange for more local control of zoning and development, it will be impossible for them to survive without federal highway funds used by states to build and maintain roads and highways.

Under a proposal by Democrat Senator Cory Booker, which has received Biden’s endorsement, cities would be held hostage and denied federal highway funds unless they “eliminate their single-family zoning and turn over their planning to the feds.”

Gone would be local control of zoning and development. Gone would be the variety that makes so many cities and towns unique and wonderful places to live, crafted to the history, culture, and vision of local residents. They would be swallowed up in a vast federal planning machine that turns quaint towns and vibrant suburban cities into federal satellite zones.

Housing discrimination is already illegal, but Biden’s plan would deprive Americans of a choice in the type of community they live in. And we thought Democrats were all about “choice.”

Biden and his Democrat cohorts are pursuing this goal under the radar. They realize that, like ObamaCare, the majority of Americans would reject it if they knew what was in it. Publicizing their efforts would be detrimental to winning at the ballot box in November.

President Trump seems to realize the danger not just to his reelection chances but, more important, to the cultural fabric of American society. On June 30, he tweeted “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 last few months have given Americans a front-row view of what it would be like to live in a nation fully run by Democrats and their destructive socialist policies — rampant violent crime, incompetent crisis response, passive law enforcement, widespread poverty, and dismal city dwelling.

Unless Americans want to embrace this kind of dystopian nightmare, we must reject the Democrats’ efforts to abolish the suburbs, which would turn the nation into one giant Chicago.

No thank you.