Obama’s Continuing War on Suburbia, Courtesy of Joe Biden

Eileen F. Toplansky writes in the American Thinker:

Like the prophets of old, Stanley Kurtz warned of the evil mongers in America, but sadly, no one seemed to heed his dire warning.

In his 2012 book titled Spreading the Wealth: How Obama is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities, Kurtz painstakingly detailed Obama’s and, now by extension, Biden’s nefarious plans to destroy the suburbs.

The ever-stealthy Obama has been assiduously working on the goal of abolishing America’s suburbs ever since his days as a community activist.

Although state laws may discourage involuntary annexation of suburbs, there are three key changes that will end the dream of a white picket fence and single family home ownership.  They include:

• Creating a no-growth boundary around each metropolitan area.  This will force ‘large numbers of Americans to abandon their cars and their dreams of freestanding houses [.]’
• Forced economic integration which translates into the government trying to systematically manage where people live by income level [.]  ‘Regulations will force builders to include a quota of low-income housing units and the free market in housing will gradually be replaced by government-planned living patterns.’
• Metropolitan regions will initiate a regime of tax sharing to reduce ‘fiscal disparities’ – shorthand for ‘suburban tax money to be transferred to cities and lower-income inner-ring suburbs.’

Coercion, not choice will mandate how this will be accomplished.  Already Americans are being told that they must stop driving their gas-fueled cars. Under the guise of helping the environment, the government accrues more power for itself.

Think socialism, social democracy, extreme liberalism, Marxism, communism.  Class warfare will be pursued as the traditional American dream of striving for a better future with the freedom to move where you please is demolished.

In 2015, Kurtz explained how then “HUD Secretary Julian Castro Announced the Finalization of the Obama administration’s Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Rule (AFFH).

In effect, AFFH gives the federal government a lever to re-engineer nearly every American neighborhood — imposing a preferred racial and ethnic composition, densifying housing, transportation, and business development in suburb and city alike, and weakening or casting aside the authority of local governments over core responsibilities, from zoning to transportation to education. Not only the policy but the political implications are immense — at the presidential, congressional, state, and local levels.

It is a scandal that the mainstream press has largely refused to report on AFFH.

Obama . . .downplayed his policy goals in this area and delayed the finalization of AFFH for years, because he [understood]  how politically explosive this rule is. Once the true implications of AFFH are understood, Americans will rebel. The only prospect for successful imposition is a frog-boiling strategy of gradual intensification.

Fundamentally, AFFH is an attempt to achieve economic integration. Race and ethnicity are being used as proxies for class [.]

Once HUD gets its hooks into a municipality, no policy area is safe. Zoning, transportation, education, all of it risks slipping into the control of the federal government and the new, unelected regional bodies [emphasis mine] the feds will empower. Over time, AFFH could spell the end of the local democracy that Alexis de Tocqueville rightly saw as the foundation of America’s liberty and distinctiveness.

In 2016 Rush Limbaugh explained that:

The one thing you have to understand about liberals is they hate suburbia. They despise it. They despise suburbia ’cause of who lives there. They despise suburbia ’cause it exists. They despise suburbia because there’s no mass transit. They despise suburbia ’cause it’s a lot of cars and SUVs and soccer moms destroying the planet by climate change. But mostly they despise it because it’s liberty and freedom. And then the third reason they despise it is, it’s people that used to live in the cities.

Therefore move some inner-city dwellers who can’t afford it out to suburbia. It’s a form of payback [.]

In fact, Paul Sperry wrote about this in 2016 in an article titled: “Obama’s Last Act is to Force Suburbs to be Less White and Less Wealthy.”

In essence, as Limbaugh pointed out:  “The scheme involves super-sizing vouchers to help urban poor afford higher rents in pricey areas, such as [New York’s] Westchester County, while assigning them government real estate agents called ‘mobility counselors’ to secure housing in the exurbs.

If suburban landlords refuse to comply, they can be sued for discrimination and this also includes refusing Section 8 tenants with criminal records.

When it was tried in Dallas, “the crime rate skyrocketed with the introduction of people with no jobs, [yet] … it was judged to be a success.”

This has been Obama’s dream for years and it will add up to economic damage and declining property values.

It stigmatizes successful people. But, more importantly, it conditions people. If you are dependent, and if you have what you have because of government, you’re fine, you’re great, you’re a model citizen. But if you’ve gone outside that, if you are a success independently, then you’re gonna be targeted and you are going to be stigmatized, you’re gonna be punished, you’re gonna pay a price for it.

With the intense push for Diversity, Inclusion and Equity (DIE), it is clear that AFFH is just another building block to punish people who have succeeded.   Given the ongoing discrimination against white people, it is all part of the bigger plan Obama envisions as he transforms the country.

The Democrat Party today wants to punish people who have prospered under capitalism, under the premise it’s unfair [.] It’s not because of merit or success. It’s luck, it’s connections, and since not everybody has luck and connections, the people who do are gonna pay a price for it. People that prospered under capitalism are corrupt. People who prospered under capitalism have done so unfairly and it’s time to level the playing field, so to speak.

Communism destroys the spirit and the motivation of human beings.

This is what the Democrat party today is, this is what progressivism is about.

Of course, with Biden in office, his puppet master Obama is revving up the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Rule (AFFH) into high gear.

Betsy McCaughey wrote in February 2023 that:

If you’ve worked hard to afford a suburban house with a patch of lawn where your kids can play, you’re under attack.

The Biden administration and Democrats in New York, Connecticut and other states are warring on local zoning laws to build high-rise apartment buildings with ‘affordable’ units in tree-lined, single-family neighborhoods. All in the name of equity, meaning everyone can live in a tranquil suburb, whether they’ve earned the money to pay for it or not.

The Biden administration announced  . . .  it will require all towns across America to submit ‘equity plans’ showing how they will make it possible for low-income people to live there, by providing affordable housing, transportation and other resources.

Towns that don’t meet the cookie-cutter requirement for economic diversity will lose federal funding.

This war against suburbia known as regionalism is a serious push toward wealth redistribution with the suburban middle class bearing the brunt of it.

As Limbaugh so presciently foretold, “Obama is a longtime supporter of ‘regionalism,’ the idea that the suburbs should be folded into the cities, merging schools, housing, transportation, and above all taxation.”

Biden fully intends to push Americans toward this social transformation with the goal of “income equalization via a massive redistribution of suburban tax money to the cities.”

You have to understand Central Planning, what it is, command-and-control economics, what it is. And it all descends from a central belief that the average man or woman is incompetent. They can’t be trusted to do the right thing for society, for themselves, for the culture. Any expressions of individuality in this regard are a threat to command-and-control types. And the more they have you in mass transit, the more they have control over where you can and can’t go.

Americans’ rights, liberty and choices are incrementally being chipped away. That white picket fence may truly be a thing of the past if Americans don’t stand up and fight back.