We Conservatives Warned of This

And were derided by the Leftists, including many here in Greenwich, as wild paranoids.

Biden Set to Revive Obama Plan to Federalize Suburban Zoning Regulation

Buried in the nearly 18,000-word White House Fact Sheet on President Joe Biden’s proposed $2.3 trillion “American Jobs Plan” infrastructure bill is one paragraph that could turn the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) into a zoning commission for suburban America.

“For decades, exclusionary zoning laws—like minimum lot sizes, mandatory parking requirements, and prohibitions on multifamily housing—have inflated housing and construction costs and locked families out of areas with more opportunities,” the fact sheet claims.

“President Biden is calling on Congress to enact an innovative, new competitive grant program that awards flexible and attractive funding to jurisdictions that take concrete steps to eliminate such needless barriers to producing affordable housing.”

The anti-exclusionary zoning law proposal, the nomination of former Rep. Marcia Fudge (D-Ohio) as HUD secretary, and his signing of an executive order on housing discrimination, are key parts of Biden’s fulfilling a 2020 campaign promise to reinstate a controversial Obama administration program known as Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH).

Less than a week after her confirmation by the Senate as HUD secretary, Fudge was asked about reinstating AFFH and, in response, she told White House reporters that the Biden administration is moving forward with such plans.

“We are looking at it. Certainly, we know that fair housing is, in fact, the law of the land, and we want to use every tool that we have.  I think that the prior administration did roll back some fair housing tools that we have. So, we’re looking at how we can go back and make those better and get them re-implemented, if possible,” Fudge said.

The Obama AFFH conditioned receipt by local and municipal officials of billions of dollars of federal assistance on their acceptance of a HUD-approved plan to eliminate zoning policies defined as discriminatory.

The Biden AFFH revival goes several steps further by providing specific examples of what it considers discriminatory zoning and creating billions of dollars in new HUD grant programs as incentives for local and municipal officials to submit to federal supervision of their decisions. A former Fudge House colleague, Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio), has just such a proposal for a new HUD grant program.

That approach, according to the Ethics and Public Policy Center senior fellow Stanley Kurtz, is nothing less than a prescription to federalize zoning functions that for centuries have been the prerogative of officials closest to residents of the neighborhoods most directly affected.

“Biden’s plan rips the heart out of local zoning authority. What, if anything, remains when the Biden administration is done won’t matter, because de facto control over the suburbs will have passed to the federal government,” Kurtz told The Epoch Times on April 12.

Kurtz believes the ultimate goal of advocates of the Biden plan is to eliminate single-family suburban neighborhoods entirely and to replace them with densely packed urban high rises.

For now, Biden is aiming to accomplish all this via community Block Grants, and prosperous towns like Greenwich can resist that inducement and retain their zoning. But that’s just a first, baby step; the Left is going for full control, administered by our intellectual betters, as witnessed by the current efforts to do just that by the Hartford Droolers. Why do these people push mass transit and the elimination of automobiles? They want the power to dictate where the proletariat lives, travels, and, with federal zoning