The Democrats put the suburbs – and family life – on the November ballot

The Democrats put the suburbs – and family life – on the November ballot

Tuesday, August 11, 2020 by: News Editors

(Natural News) President Trump recently decided to rescind the Obama administration’s Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) rule, which put pressure on suburbs to construct more low-income, high-density housing in their communities. Trump’s decision met with a predictable outcry. “It’s not even a dog whistle anymore,” Connecticut senator Chris Murphy tweeted. “Our President is now a proud, vocal segregationist.”

(Article by Rupert Darwall republished from RealClearPolicy.com)

Somehow, Democrats still see the suburbs as racially homogenized, lily-white enclaves — something they haven’t been for a long time. According to demographer Joel Kotkin and urban studies professor Alan Berger, 151 million Americans live in the suburbs and exurbs, compared with only 25 million in urban cores. A majority of African-Americans in the nation’s 100 largest metropolitan areas live in the suburbs. More Hispanics have been moving to the suburbs than whites, and the Asian population in suburban areas is growing nearly twice as fast as that of Asians living in inner-city cores.

Yet during the Obama years, the Democratic Party positioned itself on the wrong side of these realities. “The days where we’re just building sprawl forever, those days are over,” Barack Obama declared in February 2009, less than a month into his presidency. “When it comes to development, it’s time to throw out old policies that encouraged sprawl,” he told the U.S. Conference of Mayors in January 2010. Sprawl. Note the word. That’s how progressives chose to describe where most Americans live and many others aspire to live. It’s the housing equivalent of Obama’s clinging-to- guns-or-religion comment or Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” remark.

It’s not racist to want to live in a single-family home on a quarter-acre plot; it’s more like wanting to live the American dream. And the increasing racial and ethnic diversity of the suburbs means, Kotkin argues, that the targets of these heavy-handed federal social-engineering efforts are not only whites but also many minorities who have worked hard to get where they are. Natural News read more