Joe Biden is coming for the suburbs

President Trump tried to make a big deal about Joe Biden’s plan to federally mandate cheap apartments with low-income residents into suburban single-family zones.  The claim was that it would achieve “equality.”  The unstated plan was “more Democrat voters.”

Trump warned of it as a scheme to end the suburbs, and it turns out he was right.  Biden’s $3.2-trillion infrastructure plan sneaks that leftist dream scheme into its thousands of pages of legislation, instead of letting the bad idea die on its own through a true congressional vote.

The New York Post warned in 2020 that the whole scheme is ”disastrous.” 

Biden and the equality warriors are using accusations of racism to accomplish something different. Their message is: You worked and saved to move to the suburbs, but you can’t have that way of life unless everyone else can, too.

The wisdom of tightly packing them in in the Age of COVID is quite an idiocy, but as the summer of 2020 riots demonstrated, COVID precautions are unimportant when the issue is “racism,” which this Biden federal takeover of housing zonings was supposed to cure. 

Back on the 2020 campaign trail, as Trump went out (and Biden hid in his basement), Trump tried to warn them, though nobody much paid attention.

The Associated Press, in a disdainful piece, reported that Trump tweeted:

The Suburban Housewives of America must read this article. Biden will destroy your neighborhood and your American Dream. I will preserve it, and make it even better! https://t.co/1NzbR57Oe6

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 23, 2020

Besides being disdainful, the AP report was dishonest.  The AP “fact check” item falsely claimed, in the nut graf, no less, that Biden had absolutely no plan to abolish the suburbs, none, and had plenty to suggest, via convenient quotes, that anyone who thought so was a Trumpy conspiracy theorist and, a above all, a racist.

Biden does not propose banishing single-family homes. Nor would he get rid of the suburbs.

Oh, but he does, he does.  He just doesn’t say so openly.

Buried deep in Biden’s monster $2.3-trillion “infrastructure” stimulus package is a sneaky little notation that would mandate a federal takeover for local zoning for any district that takes the proffered federal money, coming off such zones’ already paid taxes.

According to Stanley Kurtz, writing at National Review:

With the introduction of his massive, $2.3 trillion “infrastructure” bill, President Biden’s campaign to end suburban single-family zoning has begun. If you think this issue was debated and resolved during the 2020 presidential campaign, you are mistaken. It’s true that Biden’s campaign platform openly and unmistakably pledged to abolish single-family zoning. As soon as President Trump made an issue of that pledge, however, Biden went virtually silent on the issue and the Democrat-supporting press falsely denied that Biden had any designs on single-family zoning at all. Now that he’s president, Biden’s infrastructure bill openly includes programs designed to “eliminate” single-family zoning (which Biden calls “exclusionary zoning”). 

Kurtz’s account is a total green-eyeshade number made easily readable, explaining that Biden’s plan is to abolish single-family zoning by holding out the carrot of federal funding to suburban towns.

The wildly overreaching Obama-Biden era Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) regulation — which Biden has pledged to revive — works in a similar fashion. The difference is that by adding another gigantic pot of federal money to the Community Development Block Grants that are the lure of AFFH, Biden makes it that much harder for suburbs to resist applying — and that much more punishing to jurisdictions that forgo a share of the federal taxes they’ve already paid so as to protect their right to self-rule.

In other words, take the king’s penny, do the king’s bidding.  The Biden plan would nationalize zoning in the hands of the feds (just as the feds would take over elections with the congressional Democrats’ despicable H.R. 1), meaning that anyone who would like the peace of living in the suburbs, and might enjoy seeing his kids go out and ride bikes without supervision, is s[ooo] out of luck.  The feds would take over in what they claim is the name of racial “balancing.”

The racial balancing claim is gallingly dishonest.  The suburbs are not segregated by race, or because ”George Wallace is blocking the door,” as Dr. Ben Carson, M.D. noted, but a function of who can afford a single-family home.  Unfortunately, that takes education, hard work, degrees, schools that teach, savings, and putting off pleasures.  Many lower-income people are deprived of that, particularly if they are stuck in Democrat teachers’ union–led zero-excellence schools and can’t get out. 

But there are many non-white people who nevertheless do.  Consistent with what even Biden himself said on the campaign trail in one of his rare, out-of-the-basement appearances, the suburbs are not a bastion of whites.  The Atlantic Monthly noted it here.  Pew Research noted it in a research study here.  The composition of the suburbs, as a whole, comes very close to the racial composition of the U.S. as a whole.

This account, from the lefty Conversation site by an Eastern Michigan U professor, notes with academic rigor these very stats:

Suburbs are being transformed by a number of different forces.

For example, white Americans are getting older and having fewer children than non-white Americans.

At the same time, more black Americans are moving to the suburbs, thanks to increased income levels and decreasing rates of housing discrimination.

These changes mean that both mature and developing suburbs are rapidly becoming less white.

Non-Hispanic Asians and Hispanics accounted for the largest percentage increase of residents in both suburban types between 2000 and 2017.

In developing suburbs, the number of non-Hispanic blacks also increased slightly during the same time period.

Between 2000 and 2017, both suburban types also witnessed an increase in non-white immigrants who have been living in the U.S. for less than 10 years.

It certainly coincides with what anyone who has contact with suburbs would know.

So now Biden wants to rearrange the racial composition of America’s neighborhoods through zoning.

I’d like to see them try that in my suburb-like neighborhood in San Diego, which is now majority Asian-American.  What are they going to do, kick out some Asian-Americans and their kids to achieve racial balance?  Most homeowners here are Vietnamese-American, the high-achieving children of the Vietnamese Boat People of the 1970s.  Crime is virtually zero, and kids of all races freely play in the streets together with no hovering parents worried about criminals or perverts.   But no matter: In Bidenworld, back in Washington, D.C. among the vast federal bureaucracies, there probably aren’t enough black people (though there certainly aren’t none, and many of the black people who live here moved in in the 1960s), in line with San Diego’s general demographic profile.

San Diego, according to the Biden administration, would need 13% black people in line with the broad national average, even if such people would have to be imported from other parts of the country, or, this being Biden, maybe from abroad.  The Vietnamese would have to go; they’d fill some slots in some other city with not enough Asian-Americans, see.

This sounds a lot like what the Soviets called tsentral planning.  We all know how that worked out.

It’s a pity, because the Democrats are determined to pass this spending monstrosity with all the federal power to meddle with local zoning as its add-on.  The suburbs were warned they could kiss their safe neighborhoods goodbye, but many suburban voters who voted for Biden refused to heed it.

Now they’re about to be altered by Biden, who’s had the suburbs in his gun sights for months.

With racial segregation or “inequality” not a true issue, what could be the purpose of seeding every suburban town with densely packed urban housing and imported residents in the age of COVID?  By abolishing local control, the plan was to create a federally mandated densely packed urban hipsterization of every town in America.  It would force residents into public transit with zero alternatives, except for the very rich.  And it would drive up taxes as suburbs would have to shell out for more roads, bigger water systems, bigger sewer lines, and more electrical infrastructure to accommodate all the non-paying low-income new arrivals.  It would force increased budgets for schools, social welfare agencies, and mass transit.  More than anything, it would create Democrat voters.

The idea has always been to turn the suburbs blue, washing out those red votes by bringing in indigents forever dependent on permanent government services as one more than whatever a suburb has.  There’s a surplus of such voters in the big cities, after all, so why not spread them out?  A bonanza for developers with new housing contracts should lead to Democrat campaign donations, as well as canceling out conservative voting patterns.

Democrats are always first and foremost about perpetrating their own power, since their actual socialist ideas are no longer persuasive with voters.  Even that was known before Biden brought in his Trojan horse for the suburbs.  Democrats wrote about how the master plan to end local zoning was all about ending Texas’s status as a red state.  They knew, and what we can tell by that is that this re-zoning to them is ultra-important, not just for Texas, but for the entire country.

Now the Trojan horse is coming.  The leftist ship is sailing.  The leftist master plan is not racial inequality, which they thrive on, but to wipe out red suburban counties and turn them all blue.

Image: Pixabay, Pixabay License.