In June 2019, Trump issued an executive order establishing a White House Council to eliminate barriers to affordable housing and appoint Carson – the only Black member of his cabinet – as its chairman. He directed the group to “address, reduce and remove the multitude of overburdening regulatory barriers that artificially increase the cost of housing development.”
At a meeting of the council with representatives of housing in the White House in November, Carson reiterated his long-standing plea that Americans abandon the “Not In My Backyard” mentality behind supporting exclusive zoning rules, according to attendees .
“Secretary Carson made a charitable case a solid case against restrictive zoning plan both on civil rights and economic grounds, and in fact the entire White House economic staff was in the room, nodding their heads.” said President David Dworkin of National Housing, a former Treasury official under both the Obama and Trump administration.
“Well, what happened?” Dworkin said.
Trump’s dramatic over-face on the issue came when he began hammering out a ‘law and order’ theme after widespread protests of racial justice this summer, lifting a page from the 1968 Richard Nixon playbook. His recent remarks about the dangers of a sweeping Obama-era fair housing rule – which Trump has dismissed – are part of a gamble he can support from troubled suburbs that are not tolerated by scenes of urban insurgency.
Trump beat Hillary Clinton in the suburbs 49 percent to 45 percent, according to redundancy polls of the 2016 presidential race, but Democrats gained control of the House of Representatives in 2018 by making deep interventions with those voters, by four seats in the former Republican stronghold of Orange County, California, demolished.
“This is an attempt to make a law-and-order case for an audience that no longer exists,” Dworkin said. “People living in the suburbs today will be largely embarrassed by these arguments and do not want to be associated with racist housing policies, even if they have reservations about affordable housing.”
Trump tried to make that case on Saturday, tweetjen: “Why would Suburban Women vote for Biden and the Democrats if Democrats run cities are now rampant with crime … that could easily spread to the suburbs, and they’ll reconstitute their low-income plan on steroids!”
For his part, Carson has spoken “Take over NIMBYs” as far back as 2018. That was the same year a HUD research report guilty of “local destinations and regulations, allowing lengthy trials, and ‘not in my backyard’ opposition as primary causes of limited housing supply and rising house prices.” That report found that “in the suburbs, NIMBYism … in recent years may have become”.
HUD declined to comment directly on Carson’s apparent shift.
“Secretary Carson does not believe that non-selected bureaucrats in Washington should institute blanket, national policies on intimate local matters such as zoning laws,” said HUD spokesman Brad Bishop.
“Due to [the 2019] executive order, the secretary has partnered with local and city leaders to investigate affordable housing needs across the country and identify unreasonably cumbersome federal regulations that delay permits and control procedures and undermine affordable housing for those most in need , “he added.
At the time, even some conservatives hailed the idea that Trump would use the federal government to support local governments in action: While Republicans typically want to protect states and locales from the heavy hand of the federal government, they are also envious of inefficiency. scrapping and expensive regulation.
It was also a great way to support the Democratic mayors of cities with the highest housing costs, including Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York – each was proposed to put up “disproportionate local regulatory barriers” to White House housing. most recent annual report of the Board of Economic Advisers, published in February.
That report, which called cutting local government barriers to housing “a priority for the Trump administration,” even called the government a fair increase in Fair Housing for 2015 – the one that Trump scrapped this summer – as a tool that the administration would use to increase the supply of housing.
The Obama era rule was intended to force locations to take active steps to combat segregation to pursue the promise of the 1968 Fair Housing Landmark Act. HUD had released a proposed rule in January to shoot down the AFFH after its implementation was delayed for years.
“HUD has also taken action under the Trump Administration to build regulatory barriers to affordable housing. The Rule for Fair Extension of Fair Housing … is being revised to focus more clearly on increasing housing supply in areas where supply is restricted, “the CEA said in its annual report.
“This rule recognizes that increasing the choice of housing for underprivileged groups requires that regulatory barriers be taken to place housing in large areas of specific areas out of reach for families with lower incomes,” the report added.
That seems to be Trump, that four months later – when a few people were talking about the suburbs in the midst of the twin crises of a global pandemic and deep recession – tweeted that he would be “Study” the “destructive” AFFH rule “at the request of many great Americans living in the suburbs.” He warned that Biden – who supports the resurrection of the original version of the rule – “wants to make her FULL WORSE.”
HUD completely withdrew the rule three weeks later. Trump has linked the move to his bid for re-election in tweets.
“The ‘suburban housewife’ will vote for me. They want security and are happy that I ended the long-running program that would allow low-income housing to invade their neighborhood. “ he tweeted on August 12th. “Biden would reinstall it in a larger form with Corey Booker [sic] in charge of!”
The op-ed he and Carson wrote in the Wall Street Journal explicitly linked the suburban argument to his campaign to paint Democratic cities as exaggerated with “crime and chaos” in the wake of the mass protests – some of which were violent – inspired by the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police.
“Rather than rethink their destructive policies, the left wants to make sure there is no escape,” she wrote. “The plan is to restore the suburbs to their image so that they resemble the dysfunctional cities they now govern. As usual, anyone who dares to tell the truth about what the left is doing is smeared as a racist. “
Sen. “Cory Booker, the New Jersey Democrat who says Trump would be accused of upholding the original fair housing regulations in a Biden administration, said the president’s attacks were another matter of his use of” racial tropics “to stir up division.
“It sounds like his normal tool in his toolbox … that’s bigotry and anxiety-mongering, and in various ways Americans are trying to pit against Americans,” Booker, one of only three Black U.S. senators, said in an MSNBC interview on Wednesday. .
Trump “thinks literally by calling on the name of a Black politician that you can somehow scare white people,” added Booker, a situation he said “is both angry at the Black community and the white community. . “
