Have you heard? Joe Biden has a radical plan to effectively eliminate suburban neighborhoods.
Despite a lack of coverage by the mainstream media, Joe Biden’s worrisome plans to seriously weaken local control of zoning laws and housing regulations merit serious scrutiny and attention from voters. By eliminating local and state control of housing regulations, Biden will be able to force single-family neighborhoods and towns to allow multi-family residential units, such as apartment buildings and low-income residential developments. This, of course, will lower the quality of suburban public schools and bring a host of other maladies, such as higher crime rates, increased traffic, decreased green space, and the degradation of self-government and accountability in small town America.
Biden has promised he would enforce the Obama administration’s radical AFFH (Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing), which featured regulations designed to force an urban low-income population into the suburbs via coercive low-income housing quotas. It is a sinister plan that Democrats hope you won’t notice, and it gets worse.
As Stanley Kurtz explains in a National Review article (Biden and Dems Are Set to Abolish the Suburbs):
What surprises me is that Biden has actually promised to go much further than AFFH. Biden has embraced Cory Booker’s strategy for ending single-family zoning in the suburbs and creating what you might call “little downtowns” in the suburbs. Combine the Obama-Biden administration’s radical AFFH regulation with Booker’s new strategy, and I don’t see how the suburbs can retain their ability to govern themselves. It will mean the end of local control, the end of a style of living that many people prefer to the city, and therefore the end of meaningful choice in how Americans can live. Shouldn’t voters know that this is what’s at stake in the election?
…this de facto annexation strategy had three parts: (1) use a kind of quota system to force “economic integration” on the suburbs, pushing urban residents outside of the city; (2) close down suburban growth by regulating development, restricting automobile use, and limiting highway growth and repair, thus forcing would-be suburbanites back to the city; (3) use state and federal laws to force suburbs to redistribute tax revenue to poorer cities in their greater metropolitan region. If you force urbanites into suburbs, force suburbanites back into cities, and redistribute suburban tax revenue, then presto! You have effectively abolished the suburbs.
Biden’s far-left housing plan could destroy suburban life in American and all of the benefits of living in a small middle-class town: quality public school systems, safe low crime neighborhoods, plentiful green spaces, and local government that is accountable to the people. Voters should think carefully about Biden’s destructive plans before the election in November.