National Review
Biden’s Executive Order on Housing: Replacing Old Sins with New Sins
The flood of executive orders from President Biden now extends to housing policy – and the promise to revert the Trump administration’s approach to “just housing”. Specifically, this would mean reversing Trump’s reversal of an Obama-era rule known as “Affirmatively Promoting Fair Housing” – designed to introduce “affordable” housing (read “subsidized”) into higher-income suburban postal codes. To justify a return to this controversial policy, President Biden rehearsed a long litany of sins in federal housing policy. He’s right about many of them – but wrong about his remedial approach. More subsidized housing, in the tragic tradition of public housing, will only stimulate division and do little to help minority groups in their quest for upward mobility. It is uncontroversial, as President Biden stated in his executive order, that “during the 20th century, federal, state and local governments systematically implemented racially discriminatory housing policies that contributed to segregated neighborhoods and inhibited equal opportunities and the chance to build wealth for blacks, Latinos, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, and Native American families and other underserved communities. ”Most significantly, the Federal Housing Authority would not secure mortgages for blacks in white neighborhoods, and racial agreements – writing restrictions against blacks (and Jews, by the way) – were the norm in the 1950s. Urban highways plowed down neighborhoods income, often (though not exclusively) of minorities, displacing thousands. Today, we are left with Cross Bronx Expressway and Chrysler Freeway. Even this apology is, however, selective. African-Americans, in particular, suffered the tragedy of a progressive (still) favorite program: public housing. An important story here is underestimated. Historically black neighborhoods – Central Harlem, Detroit’s Black Bottom, Chicago’s Bronzeville, Desoto-Carr in St. Louis – were denigrated as slums, although they were home to a large number of residential owners and hundreds of black-owned businesses. When they were released to make way for public housing, they were replaced by skyscrapers in which property – accumulation of assets – was, by definition, impossible. The social fabric of self-help, civil society and upward mobility has been destroyed. Blacks have always been, and continue to be, disproportionately represented in public and subsidized housing, often tied to long-term dependence on counterproductive policies: when their income increases, rent also increases. Making up for this double story of absolute racism and harmful progressivism should not mean a new generation of housing sins. But Affirmatively Promoting Fair Housing, if restored, is just that. Federal pressure – by leveraging local aid programs – to force the introduction of subsidized housing for low-income tenants has been a guarantee of resilience on the part of the lower middle class, white and black, justifiably concerned about families who have not struggled and saved to reach their neighborhoods will pose problems. Concentrations of tenants of housing vouchers, dispersed by the demolition of some public housing projects, have already spread malfunctions and poor maintenance – including apartment buildings in Warrensville Heights, the hometown of Márcia Fudge, the new secretary of the United States Department of Housing. , Ohio and Urban Development. Racial integration and fair housing remain objectives that America must strive for. But that means understanding how neighborhoods work. Americans, blacks and whites, choose to live in areas where they share the socioeconomic characteristics of their neighbors. Some liberals may not like this – but those are their personal choices as well. When members of minority groups share the economic and educational background of new neighbors, the chances of intolerance are greatly reduced. That is why “fair housing” should mean non-discrimination – not new subsidized developments. Instead, Biden is doubling the example set by the Obama administration in Westchester County, which was forced to spend $ 60 million to subsidize 874 housing units – in a county in which racial and ethnic minorities are already well represented. This means that current black and Hispanic homeowners, who have bought their homes with effort and savings, will have to see their municipal taxes used to subsidize others in the order of $ 68,000 per home. “Excluding” suburbs will not be opened by confrontation. There will be endless processes. Instead, the HUD, if it wants to have some useful role, should try to use tools such as model zoning (suggestions, not mandates) to convince local planning councils to allow the market to build affordable, naturally occurring housing – small houses, including small multifamilies, in small batches. Historically, this is how the American working class was able to buy houses. An administration genuinely interested in correcting the sins of the past with housing policy would not neglect existing problems of public and subsidized housing. Here’s a bold idea: sell public housing projects on high-value real estate (see Brooklyn’s waterfront) and provide cash compensation to residents. They must be able to move where they want – or just put the money aside. There is much to be corrected about our housing past. Doubling up previous sins is not the way to start.