Housing policy may seem like a dull subject, but this century has proven it is anything but. Just consider for a moment the importance of housing in your personal life — where you choose to or must live and the costs it entails.
And then think of housing’s role in the life of the nation. For example, government intervention on the matter of homeownership led to economic catastrophe in the recent past. And today, a debate is raging in many communities about increasing housing costs. In places like California, the strictures of local zoning laws have created an artificial scarcity so acute as to drive away the middle class.
With President-Elect Joe Biden’s announcement that he will choose Democratic Rep. Marcia Fudge of Ohio, as his secretary of Housing and Urban Development, senators owe it to the public to raise questions during Fudge’s confirmation hearings about another Obama-era housing policy that Biden may attempt to revive.
The Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule, which the Trump administration finally rescinded in July, attempted to condition federal housing aid to local jurisdictions upon effective federal control of local zoning and housing policy. Supposedly in the interest of racial justice, the Obama administration had wanted to encourage the construction of “affordable” housing in suburban areas and to encourage high-density apartment buildings instead of areas exclusively populated by single-family homes.
The premise was that single-family suburban neighborhoods are racist by their very nature and should be transformed.
There are several problems with this idea. For one thing, the suburbs have already been becoming more diverse all on their own without such a policy as nonwhites have become more prosperous, and more of them have moved outward to safer, calmer spaces. These people are seeking the very sort of areas dominated by single-family plots that characterize suburban life.
The truth is that even assuming that a government role in racially diversifying neighborhoods is appropriate, it is clearly unnecessary. Between 2000 and 2018, the white share of the suburban U.S. population fell by 8 percentage points, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of Census data. As the suburbs grow, and suburban counties remain the fastest-growing counties in the United States, they are becoming less white, to the point that they are starting to reflect national demographics. Blacks, who make up 13% of the overall U.S. population, now comprise 11% of suburbanites — a number that is growing. Hispanics represent 18% of the U.S. population and, as of 2018, were 14% of suburbanites.
The suburbs aren’t everyone’s cup of tea. But for those nonwhite up-and-comers who in growing numbers have sought out the suburban lifestyle for its large houses, verdant lawns, cul-de-sacs, and low-crime neighborhoods, the Obama administration’s effort to transform suburban life into something it wasn’t before must have been rather annoying. An effort by Biden to bring it back in the name of racial progress would be equally misguided.
The federal government doesn’t belong in charge of zoning policy at all. It isn’t racist to say that. And in fact, it is doubtful that changing the character of the suburbs will promote racial justice. It will, however, change increasingly diverse communities around the nation into something the local residents specifically chose against when they moved there.
