For years, President Joe Biden has been pushing a budget that includes billions of taxpayer dollars, via federal grants, to incentivize state and local governments to ease up on single-family zoning laws in order to bring more “affordable housing” to a neighborhood near you. Current laws, his supporters claim, are “fueling racial inequalities.”
U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development spokesman Michael Burns says, “Equity is a guiding principle of all the work we are doing, and that certainly extends to housing supply.” Think the quality of your public schools sucks now?
Meanwhile, Gov. Kathy Hochul (D-N.Y.) is attempting to force towns around New York City to rezone for high-density housing in areas close to train stops. Places like Oregon and Minneapolis have already taken the lead to dismantle what critics call “exclusionary zoning” (and what the rest of us call “living within your means”) by mandating local municipalities to build “affordable housing.” And in Chicago, Mayor Brandon Johnson is cementing a plan to turn empty office buildings in the city’s business district into residential units, with at least 30% of those units being required to provide “affordable housing.”
If 30% of the residential units in your neighborhood were suddenly transformed into low-cost units, what would that do to the neighborhood? To the parks? To the schools? To the crime rate? To the quality of life? But Johnson is just getting started. This specific project is just the beginning of what he calls “our shared commitment” to “creating affordable housing in every single neighborhood.”
Affordable housing in every single neighborhood.
Last year, our sock-puppet-in-chief started requiring towns to submit “equity plans” showing what steps they’re taking to provide “affordable housing” to low-income people on pain of losing federal funding. This approach is more to the liking of other Democrats, for whom Biden was using too many carrots and not enough sticks. Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) support withholding federal funds to cities that don’t willingly comply. The beatings will continue until morale improves.
How this is constitutional is beyond me, but as we now have retired SCOTUS justices deriding the Constitution as something “no one wants,” I guess shame on me for being so naïve.
As of this past month, Biden’s marionettists were still at it. Unable to experience shame for their breathtaking economic illiteracy, his handlers continue to blame decades-old zoning laws for current housing supply “shortages.” They have nothing to say about the supply chain interruptions, which we are still feeling, due to Democrat-induced COVID panic, nor about artificially low interest rates, which increase housing demand. They don’t talk about Democrat pro-crime policies, which exacerbate the urban flight to the suburbs. It’s like they don’t understand the laws of cause and effect.
Or maybe they do understand the laws of cause and effect and nonetheless push these policies, as a way of intentionally destroying that essential backbone of free market capitalism, the middling classes, first in the cities and then in the suburbs. Gee, it’s almost like these Marxist-preaching demagogues are doing exactly what they said they were going to do.
Affordable housing in every single neighborhood.
This is their stated goal: to turn bourgeois middle-class America into a dystopian leftist hellhole. When they say “equity,” what they mean is that if they can’t have something nice, then neither can you, and they’re gonna bring the whole thing crashing down. This is a resentful Cain killing a competent Abel.
People’s houses are usually their biggest assets. By forcing our towns to re-zone for “affordable housing,” the government would instantly devalue our homes to the tune of decades’ worth of our paychecks. This doesn’t put a penny into the pockets of spiteful leftists, but so long as it’s taken out of our pockets, they’ll have made things “fair.”
You can’t mandate a limited resource. All existing housing is affordable, depending on the financial status of the buyer. I live in the house I do… because I can afford it. If I couldn’t afford it, I wouldn’t be living here.
But that’s because we are governed by a different set of rules. If we can’t afford a house, we don’t buy it. Pure and simple. We don’t whine about imaginary unfairness, and we don’t try to buy it anyway while voting for politicians eager to push the bill onto others. That’s what being a mature, financially responsible adult looks like.
The “affordable housing” pitch is tailored to win middle-class hearts by appealing to the American spirit of generosity. We’ve all been at points in our lives where we’ve needed help from others. Those of us petty bourgeoisie who resist “affordable housing” in our neighborhoods are derided as callous Scrooges who pull the ladder up behind us once we reach the promised land.
As far as I’m concerned, they can stick this implication in Hunter’s pipe and smoke it. Like most people reading this article, my wife and I were finally able to afford a house because we busted our butts to do so. We attended college every day, worked crummy jobs by night, and climbed that tedious corporate ladder to get to where we are. We did so while bouncing from city apartment to city apartment, slowly moving our way up and experiencing multiple burglaries in more than one of them.
Most importantly, we deferred a lot of fun in the interest of making responsible choices that would pay off in the long run. On the one hand, we didn’t engage in partying, drinking, drugs, impulse spending, or child-rearing before we were financially prepared. On the other hand, we didn’t waste away decades in low-skilled, manual labor jobs with zero ambition to further our education or marketability. We didn’t blow our money on Escalades or at casinos. We paid all our taxes and followed all the rules. When things went wrong, we blamed ourselves, not The Man.
By brain and by brawn, everything we have is earned. Furthermore, the 2020 census shows that race is not a barrier to suburban home ownership. The only way that race ever factored into my journey is the fact that I never received any race-based handouts, scholarships, or privileges along the way. And if you have a problem with my modest success because of the color of my skin, then you, not me, are the racist.
It’s not “racist,” “discriminatory,” or any other of the Left’s boogeyman scare words to want to preserve what you’ve earned. Municipalities want to attract and keep stable, financially secure, and responsible homeowners. Such homeowners increase the quality of life, the performance of schools, the safety of the streets, and the coffers of tax collections. the homeowners themselves greatly desire these benefits and seek to maintain them.
Our zoning laws and other state and municipal laws help to uphold the standards that we pay an arm and a leg to maintain. This means no bass-bumpin’ midnight parties, no gang fights in the schools, no cars parked on front lawns, no drug dealers at the playgrounds, and no multiple families living in single-family homes. Our property taxes pay for this, and we pay the property taxes.
When bureaucratic miscreants erode our local zoning laws, homeowners start to move out. This results in less taxes, failing schools, and dangerous streets. Other homeowners then try to move out as well, only to discover that their house is now worth much less than it was a few years ago. The cycle is self-perpetuating, and soon thereafter the neighborhood represents just another failed socialist experiment in obstinacy. If Brandon Johnson were my mayor, and I just found out he was turning 30% of my neighborhood into “affordable housing,” you can bet I’d have a FOR SALE sign out front the very next morning. But hey… equity.
How do we fight this? All politics is local. A Republican president cannot solve the problems being created at ground level. As uninteresting as they may be, we have to get as involved in our local zoning board meetings as much as we’re finally starting to get involved in our local school board meetings.
If your commissioners are trying to sneak in “affordable housing” under the radar, you can rest assured it won’t be in their corner of town. Shine a light on what they’re doing. We don’t always get to choose the fields on which we fight battles. If leftists are launching their assaults through zoning decisions, then this is where we have to meet and defeat them.