STANLEY KURTZ writes about Obama’s Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing scheme, which will affirmatively further unfair housing and dramatically diminish local autonomy:

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).
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— Comments —

Loren Piller writes:

The simple solution is to un-incorporate and literally disappear into the countryside. Yes, you and your neighbors will have to pay for the upkeep of your own roads but you have to do that now anyway. This is  a plan that could be reversed by a Republican administration, but since there are very few Republicans in the Republican party, I don’t see that happening. Those that can will move far enough away that it will make the metropolitan areas as weak as the cities are now. Nothing new here. Those who could, have already moved and those who can, are and will be moving. The left is just trying to catch up with the existing demographic trends.

There is no saving this civilization. There is just getting as far away as possible so that you can survive it.

 Matthew H. writes:

Chicago has been exporting its poor for decades. Small towns in central and southern Illinois are filled with Section 8 apartment complexes and trailer parks that are occupied by former residents of Chicago housing projects. In a small town with 4,000 residents, maybe 40 to 70 will be former residents of Cabrini Green or the Robert Taylor homes.

What happens? Nothing, really. The poor don’t assimilate into the culture of rural America. They simply form little…micro-ghettos, for lack of a better term. A trailer park of 200 units will have a “bad side” that is filled with former residents of the ghetto. Alternatively, an apartment complex consisting of 12 8-unit buildings will have one of those buildings occupied by former residents of the projects. That’s the building that the police always visit.

The big-city poor transported to rural America still act like big-city poor. They have children out of wedlock. Many of the teenaged boys commit crimes and cultivate a “gangsta” image. They continue to collect welfare and never seem to take advantage of better employment opportunities.

Fortunately there simply aren’t enough of the transplanted urban poor to cause TOO many problems for their neighbors. Because there are so few of them, they don’t really change the character of the neighborhood. But things don’t improve for the transplanted urban poor, either. Nothing really changes.

Bert Perry writes:

The use of Portland as an example floored me.  Back in 2001–including September 11–I was with my family right across from the convention center, and we were struck that the entire area around the convention center had very few restaurants, but had a lot of rescue missions.  Prime real estate, right on the Willamette, and it was a ghost town after 6 p.m.  What was going on: their little trolley made it darned near impossible to drive downtown, and hence people didn’t go there.

It is as if Mr. Obama and his friends have not figured out that there is a reason most of us do not choose to live downtown.

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