Attention America’s Suburbs: You Have Just Been Annexed
By Stanley Kurtz
NationalReview.com
It’s
difficult to say what’s more striking about
President Obama’s Affirmatively Furthering Fair
Housing (AFFH) regulation: its breathtaking
radicalism,
the refusal
of the press to
cover it, or its potential political
ramifications.
The danger AFFH poses to Democrats explains why the
press barely mentions it. This lack of curiosity, in
turn, explains why the revolutionary nature of the
rule has not been properly understood. Ultimately,
the regulation amounts to back-door annexation, a
way of turning America’s suburbs into tributaries of
nearby cities.
This has
been Obama’s purpose from the start. In Spreading
the Wealth: How Obama Is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay
for the Cities,
I explain how a young Barack Obama turned
against the suburbs and
threw in his lot with a group of Alinsky-style
community organizers who blamed suburban tax-flight
for urban decay. Their bible was Cities
Without Suburbs,
by former Albuquerque mayor David Rusk. Rusk, who
works closely with Obama’s Alinskyite mentors and
now advises the Obama administration, initially
called on cities to annex their surrounding suburbs.
When it became clear that outright annexation was a
political non-starter, Rusk and his followers
settled on a series of measures designed to achieve
de facto annexation over time.
The plan
has three elements: 1) Inhibit suburban growth, and
when possible encourage suburban re-migration to
cities. This can be achieved, for example, through
regional growth boundaries (as in Portland), or by
relative neglect of highway-building and repair in
favor of public transportation. 2) Force the urban
poor into the suburbs through the imposition of
low-income housing quotas. 3) Institute “regional
tax-base sharing,” where a state forces
upper-middle-class suburbs to transfer tax revenue
to nearby cities and less-well-off inner-ring
suburbs (as in Minneapolis/St. Paul).
If you
press suburbanites into cities, transfer urbanites
to the suburbs, and redistribute suburban tax money
to cities, you have effectively abolished the
suburbs. For all practical purposes, the suburbs
would then be co-opted into a single metropolitan
region. Advocates of these policy prescriptions call
themselves “regionalists.”
AFFH
goes a long way toward achieving the regionalist
program of Obama and his organizing mentors. In
significant measure, the rule amounts to a de facto
regional annexation of America’s suburbs. To see
why, let’s have a look at the rule.
AFFH
obligates any local jurisdiction that receives HUD
funding to conduct a detailed analysis of its
housing occupancy by race, ethnicity, national
origin, English proficiency, and class (among other
categories). Grantees must identify factors (such as
zoning laws, public-housing admissions criteria, and
“lack of regional collaboration”) that account for
any imbalance in living patterns. Localities must
also list “community assets” (such as quality
schools, transportation hubs, parks, and jobs) and
explain any disparities in access to such assets by
race, ethnicity, national origin, English
proficiency, class, and more. Localities must then
develop a plan to remedy these imbalances, subject
to approval by HUD.
By
itself, this amounts to an extraordinary takeover of
America’s cities and towns by the federal
government. There is more, however.
AFFH
obligates grantees to conduct all of these analyses
at both the local and regional levels. In other
words, it’s not enough for, say, Philadelphia’s
“Mainline” Montgomery County suburbs to analyze
their own populations by race, ethnicity, and class
to determine whether there are any imbalances in
where groups live, or in access to schools, parks,
transportation, and jobs. Those suburbs are also
obligated to compare their own housing situations to
the Greater Philadelphia region as a whole.
So if
some Montgomery County’s suburbs are predominantly
upper-middle-class, white, and zoned for
single-family housing, while the Philadelphia region
as a whole is dotted with concentrations of
less-well-off African Americans, Hispanics, or
Asians, those suburbs could be obligated to nullify
their zoning ordinances and build high-density,
low-income housing at their own expense. At that
point, those suburbs would have to direct
advertising to potential minority occupants in the
Greater Philadelphia region. Essentially, this is
what HUD has imposed on Westchester County, New
York, the most famous dry-run for AFFH.
In other
words, by obligating all localities receiving HUD
funding to compare their demographics to the region
as a whole, AFFH effectively nullifies municipal
boundaries. Even with no allegation or evidence of
intentional discrimination, the mere existence of a
demographic imbalance in the region as a whole must
be remedied by a given suburb. Suburbs will
literally be forced to import population from
elsewhere, at their own expense and in violation of
their own laws. In effect, suburbs will have been
annexed by a city-dominated region, their laws
suspended and their tax money transferred to
erstwhile non-residents. And to make sure the new
high-density housing developments are close to
“community assets” such as schools, transportation,
parks, and jobs, bedroom suburbs will be forced to
develop mini-downtowns. In effect, they will become
more like the cities their residents chose to leave
in the first place.
It’s
easy to miss the de facto absorption of local
governments into their surrounding regions by AFFH,
because the rule disguises it. AFFH does contain a
provision that allows individual jurisdictions to
formally join a regional consortium. Yet the rule
leaves it up to local authorities to decide whether
to enter regional groupings — or at least the rule
appears to make participation in regional
decision-making voluntary. In truth, however, just
by obligating grantees to compare their housing to
the demographics of the greater metropolitan area,
and remedy any disparities, HUD has effectively
turned every suburban jurisdiction into a helpless
satellite of its nearby city and region.
We can
see this, because the final version of AFFH includes
much more than just the provisions of the rule
itself. The
final text of the regulation incorporates
summaries of the many public comments on the
preliminary rule, along with replies to those
comments by HUD. This amounts to a running dialogue
between leftist housing activists trying to make the
rule more controlling, local bureaucrats overwhelmed
by paperwork, a public outraged by federal
overreach, and HUD itself.
Read
carefully, the section of the rule on “Regional
Collaboration and Regional Analysis” (especially
pages 188–203), reveals one of AFFH’s key secrets:
It doesn’t really matter whether a local government
decides to formally join a regional consortium or
not. HUD can effectively draft any suburb into its
surrounding region, just by forcing it to compare
its demographics with the metropolitan area as a
whole.
At one
point (pages 189–191), for example, commenters
directly note that the obligation to compare local
and regional data, and remedy any disparities,
amounts to forcing a jurisdiction to ignore its own
boundaries. Without contradicting this assertion,
HUD then insists that all jurisdictions will have to
engage in exactly such regional analysis.
Comments
from leftist housing activists repeatedly call on
HUD to pressure local jurisdictions into regional
planning consortia. At every point, however, HUD
declines to demand that local governments formally
join such regional collaborations. Yet each time the
issue comes up, HUD assures the housing activists
that just by compelling local jurisdictions to
compare their demographics with the region as a
whole, suburbs will effectively be forced to address
demographic disparities at the total metropolitan
level (e.g., page 196).
When
housing activists worry that a suburb with few poor
or minority residents will argue that it has no need
to develop low-income housing, HUD makes it clear
that the regulation as written already effectively
forces all suburbs to accommodate the needs of
non-residents (pages 198–199). Again, HUD stresses
that the mere obligation to analyze, compare, and
remedy demographic disparities at the local and
regional levels amounts to a kind of compulsory
regionalism.
HUD’s
language is coy and careful. The Obama
administration clearly wants to avoid alarming local
governments, so it underplays the extent to which
they have been effectively dissolved and
regionalized by AFFH. At the same time, HUD wants to
tip off its leftist allies that this is exactly what
has happened.
At one
level, then, the apparatus of formal and voluntary
collaboration in a regional consortium is a bit of a
ruse. AFFH amounts to an annexation of suburbs by
cities, whether the suburbs like it or not. Yet the
formal, regional groupings enabled by the rule are
far from harmless.
Comments
from housing advocates (pages 194–197), for example,
chide HUD for failing to include a mention in AFFH
of the hundreds of federally-funded regional plans
already being developed by leftist activists across
the country (the “Sustainable Communities Regional
Planning Grant” program). These plans entail far
more than imposing low-income housing quotas on the
suburbs. They embody the regionalist program of densifying
housing in suburb and city alike,
and they structure transportation spending in such a
way as to make
suburban living far less convenient and workable.
HUD replies that these plans can indeed be used by
regional consortia to fulfill their obligations
under AFFH.
So a
city could formally join with some less-well-off
inner-ring suburbs and present one of these
comprehensive regionalist dream-plans as the product
of its consortium. At that point, HUD could pressure
reluctant upper-middle-class suburbs to embrace the
entire plan on pain of losing their federal funds.
In this way, AFFH could force the full menu of
regionalist policies—not just low-income housing
quotas—onto the suburbs.
There
are plenty of ways in which HUD can pressure a
suburb to bend to its will. The techniques go far
beyond threats to withhold federal funds. The recent
Supreme Court decision in Texas
Department of Housing and Community Affairs v.
Inclusive Communities Project has
opened the door to “disparate impact” suits against
suburbs by HUD and private groups alike. That is,
any demographic imbalance, whether intentional or
not, can be treated by the courts as de facto
discrimination.
Just by
completing the obligatory demographic analysis
demanded by AFFH—with HUD-provided data, and
structured according to HUD requirements—a suburb
could be handing the government evidence to be used
in such a lawsuit. Worse, AFFH demands that suburbs
account for their demographic disparities, and
forces them to choose from a menu of HUD-provided
explanations. So if a suburb follows HUD’s lead and
formally attributes demographic “imbalances” to its
zoning laws, the federal government has what amounts
to a signed confession to present in a
disparate-impact suit seeking to nullify local
zoning regulations. With a (forced) paper
“confession” from nearly every suburb in the country
in hand, HUD can use the threat of lawsuits to press
reluctant municipalities to buy into a regional
consortium’s every plan.
Regionalists consider the entire city-suburb system
bigoted and illegitimate, so there are few local
governments that HUD would not be able to slap with
a disparate-impact suit on regionalist premises.
It’s unlikely that any suburb has a perfect
demographic and “asset” balance in every category.
All HUD has to do is decide which suburban
governments it wants to lean on. With every locality
vulnerable to a suit, every locality can be made to
play the regionalist game.
Leftist
housing activists worry that AFFH never specifies
the penalties a suburb will face for imbalances in
its housing patterns. These activists just don’t get
it. A thoughtful reading of AFFH, including its
extraordinary “dialogue” section, makes it clear
that HUD can go after any suburb, any time it wants
to. The controlling consideration will be politics.
HUD has got to boil the frog slowly enough to
prevent him from jumping.
It will take time for the truth
to emerge. Just by issuing AFFH, the Obama
administration has effectively annexed America’s
suburbs to its cities. The old American practice of
local self-rule is gone. We’ve switched over to a
federally controlled regionalist system. Now it’s
strictly a question of how obvious Obama and the
Democrats want to make this change — and when they
intend to bring the hammer down. The only thing that
can restore local control is joint action by a
Republican president and a Republican congress to
rescind AFFH and restrict the reach of disparate
impact litigation. We’ll know after
November 8, 2016.