Obama’s Attack on the Suburbs Is an Attack on the American Dream
The hypocrisy of government “planners” is astounding. Government planners are experts at planning destruction, distancing themselves from the results, and then recommending additional planning to fix what they have destroyed. They have been rearranging society according to their social engineering agenda, redistributive economic theories, cynical “division politics” strategies, and racial quotas for decades and the more planning they do, the more chaos we get.
I have been closely following the Obama Administration’s recently announced plan to racially diversify upper middle income neighborhoods through their recent HUD directive titled “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing” for some time now, and continue to wonder when the media and curious Americans are going to start asking the hard questions about this incessant drive to socially engineer our lives, and the devastating outcomes they have produced.
Sadly, I doubt the media will delve into the complicated but overwhelmingly negative externalities generated by years of adherence to the liberal social planners’ agenda, and their societal reorganization goals. So it’s our turn to bypass them and ask the hard questions ourselves.
Here’s the critical question for the government planners: Who is in charge of the neighborhoods and cities with significant minority populations, and why are many of these areas struggling?
Of course, the answers are extremely inconvenient for the liberal social planners among us because the correlation between liberal governance and their symbiotic “planning” agenda in inner cities, and economic hardship for its citizens, is high. If the government planners who engineered the negative economic outcomes, housing outcomes, and education outcomes in the inner cities they dominate failed to generate even average outcomes for their citizens, then why would middle-class America be remotely open to the idea of these destructive planners engineering outcomes in their neighborhoods?
The planners, in conjunction with the liberal political and activist class, will, of course, blame the inevitable backlash against this attempt to place government sponsored housing in upper middle income neighborhoods on racism, but Americans are tiring of this old trick. Americans of all races, creeds, and countries of origin want to live in neighborhoods of their own choice and choose these neighborhoods for a variety of reasons. Some choose the convenience of city-living because they dislike long commutes. Others choose the suburbs because they want a yard for their children to play in. And some choose the country because they like the relaxing symphony of the Lord’s sounds of nature at night. Pretending these decisions are the twisted result of a devoutly racist country is an insult to every American who bought their home because it was their piece of the American Dream, not a bullet point in a government master-planning document.
The rank hypocrisy here, which escapes the media spin doctors who are avoiding this story because of its potentially explosive impact on electoral politics, is that it’s the planner’s adherence to the tax-and-spend ideology and zoning regulations which are primary drivers of generational poverty in the very areas many struggling Americans are looking to escape from, and the low income housing crisis in America, respectively. Restrictive zoning and “rent control” policies have long been pointed to as drivers of housing shortages and any Econ 101 student understands that when you restrict the supply of any good or service, the price will rise.
Magnifying the problem is that restrictive zoning requirements add layers of fixed costs to housing construction projects which make the business of building homes profitable and sustainable only if you build high income housing to defray the fixed costs. The Left employs this same hat trick often; first they create a problem, and then they propose more of the poison as an antidote. They created the low income housing crisis through their adherence to heavy zoning, planning, and housing regulation, then they ruined the many inner cities, where they govern unchallenged, forcing people out of those cities to the suburbs, and now they chase those same people to the suburbs following them with legislative and regulatory threats to impose their big government agenda on them, regardless of how far away they move or how desperate they are to escape their grasp.
I know many of you are overwhelmed right now with the avalanche of bad news emanating from the Obama Administration on both the foreign policy and domestic fronts. It’s a challenge to keep up with it all. But, the Obama Administration’s war on the suburbs is an attack on that portion of the unique American Dream which every American cherishes, a small piece of land which we can look at and call “home.”
Conservatives should fight this HUD rule and defund this attack on their constituents’ front door. (Posted with permission of the author, “Obama’s Attack on the Suburbs Is an Attack on the American Dream”, originally appeared HERE)
Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.
