Trump Repeals the Last of Obama’s Suburb-Destroying Housing Rule

President Donald Trump took the final step this week to repeal the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule, an Obama-era relic that threatened to turn the suburbs into a twin image of the inner cities.

“I am happy to inform all of the people living their Suburban Lifestyle Dream that you will no longer be bothered or financially hurt by having low income housing built in your neighborhood,” Trump tweeted on Wednesday. “Your housing prices will go up based on the market, and crime will go down. I have rescinded the Obama-Biden AFFH Rule. Enjoy!”

Under the Obama rule, local governments were required to “prove that federal subsidies for housing projects would not go to developments with zoning laws or other regulations that are effectively discriminatory to minorities, particularly Black and Hispanic Americans,” according to a description by The Hill reported.

This sounds like the kind of thing that everyone would like to see, but as with all things proposed by Democrats, this rule was not what it appeared. In a blistering op-ed in the New York Post, columnist Betsy McCaughey explained that Joe Biden’s support of the rule would prove disastrous for the suburbs.

“The ex-veep wants to ramp up an Obama-era social engineering scheme called Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) that mercifully barely got underway before President Trump took office, vowing to stop it,” McCaughey wrote. “Biden’s plan is to force suburban towns with single-family homes and minimum lot sizes to build high-density affordable housing smack in the middle of their leafy neighborhoods — local preferences and local control be damned.”

In other words, this wasn’t about nondiscrimination – this was about making certain that every suburb carved out space for low-income individuals to purchase housing with federal subsidies. Through this scheme, welfare-dependent families could avoid moving into some packed apartment building in the worst part of the city; they could move in right next door to a family making six figures with a little help from the benevolent federal government.

“Had the rule been implemented nationwide,” McCaughey wrote, “towns everywhere would have had to scrap zoning, build bigger water and sewer lines to support high-density living, expand schools and social services and add mass transit. All pushing up local taxes. Towns that refused would lose their federal aid.”

But this is the Democrat way. When there are Americans who have worked hard to make a better life for themselves, the Democrats answer is to level the playing field. Oh, that’s a lovely neighborhood you guys have created for yourself, but it’s not fair that only you get to live there! We’re just going to fix that for you.

Good on Trump for scrapping the last remnants of this community-organizing disaster. Let’s not vote in the guy who’ll bring it back.