Biden to Resurrect Obama’s Racist Suburb Regulation
The White House will “examine” the Trump administration’s ending of the race-based AFFH rule.
The Biden administration announced last week that it will examine the effects of the Trump administration’s actions on ending the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule (AFFH), the Obama-era Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) rule secretively created to further the leftist social-engineering scheme designed to effect greater federal control over American suburbs.
In ending the AFFH last July, Donald Trump’s secretary of HUD, Ben Carson, asserted, “The best run communities are the ones run locally. Today, we are tearing down the Obama Administration’s Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule, which was an overreach of unelected Washington bureaucrats into local communities.”
In announcing its own intended reversal, the Biden administration referenced the typical Democrat identity-politics tropes of systemic racism and discrimination as the rationale for its action.
Peter Kirsanow, arguing against the AFFH back in 2017, noted that race was its primary and essentially sole category of measurement. For HUD, fairness is supposed to be addressed via race-neutral means. The AFFH does the opposite by elevating and emphasizing race in determining housing policy.
Power Line’s Paul Mirengoff wrote in July, “[The AFFH] enables the federal government to order more than 1,200 cities and counties that accept any part of annual community development block grants to rezone neighborhoods along income and racial criteria. It thus allows unaccountable federal bureaucrats to dictate who lives where, in order to create racially and economically balanced neighborhoods. It effectively abolishes self-government in the suburbs.”
No wonder the Biden administration is looking to resurrect this dangerous and Liberty-threatening rule. And all in the name of “equity.”