• Obama administration says living in a nice neighborhood is “racist.”
By Robert Romano —
In September, Congress averted a partial government shutdown when it voted to continue appropriations at 2015 levels, but those only go through the next month, when another omnibus spending bill or continuing resolution will be needed. That means there is still time for Congress to consider attaching policy riders to the legislation that limit the size and scope of government and deny President Barack Obama funds to carry out his agenda.
First on the list should be the July 2015 Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) rule that will force local communities to build evenly distributed neighborhoods based on income and race.
In 2012, HUD disbursed about $3.8 billion of these grants to about 1,200 municipalities. To continue receiving those grants, zoning plans will now need federal approval that they met with the government’s racial guidelines.
According to the rule, “This final rule, and assessment tools and guidance to be issued, will assist recipients of federal funding to use that funding and, if necessary, adjust their land use and zoning laws in accordance with their existing legal obligation to affirmatively further fair housing.”
These are racial and income housing quotas, plain and simple. HUD is saying that your community’s zoning plan might be discriminatory because it has too many nice homes to live in that poor minorities cannot afford. Since when is living in a nice neighborhood racist?
As it is now, local zoning rules only determine what can be built where, not who can live in a community. Real housing discrimination, that is, refusing to rent or sell based on race, has been illegal since the 1960s.
The housing market determines what houses will cost based primarily on demand. Can’t afford your dream home? Sorry, that’s not discrimination. That’s economics.
But under the new rule, HUD will use that very type of statistical analysis to decide if your neighborhood is racist, and condition receipt of federal grant monies on that determination. This is why Congress needs to act.
In June, Congress passed an amendment by Representative Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) to the Transportation and HUD appropriations bill that would bar the departments from using any funds to carry out the rules. Companion legislation in the Senate by Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah), “Local Zoning Decisions Protection Act of 2015,” would do the same and also deny the use of funds to “design, build, maintain, utilize, or provide access to a federal database of geospatial information on community racial disparities or disparities in access to affordable housing.”
Language similar to the Lee-Gosar defund measures could easily be attached to the upcoming spending bill for fiscal year 2016.
The question Republican lawmakers should ask themselves with regards to defunding the rule—which most folks truthfully have not even heard of—would Obama shut down the government to impose his racial housing quotas?
Republicans should be relishing this debate, and dare Obama to veto legislation that takes out the HUD rule to redraw every neighborhood in America that accepts federal money.
Congress needs to remind Obama that it’s your neighborhood he’s messing with and act accordingly. This is an issue congressional Republicans can win on.
Robert Romano is the senior editor of Americans for Limited Government.
First, the obligation to affirmatively further fair housing has existed for decades under the Housing and Community Development Act of 1974 which created Community Development Block Grants. When a jurisdiction accepts CDBG funds, it certifies that it is spending the grant money to affirmatively furthering fair housing (AFFH) as required by law. AFFH means reducing racial, ethnic, and economic segregation, largely by removing the practices and laws that governments and the real estate industry have imposed on us to force the social engineering of segregation on America.
Second, Mr. Romano confuses a tool for measuring the relative degree of segregation with goals under the law. He writes “force local communities to build evenly distributed neighborhoods based on income and race.” That assertion is pure fiction. He’s confused about the Dissimilarity Index which academics and now HUD use to estimate the relative degree of segregation in a community. The index identifies the percentage of a group that would have to move to have an even distribution throughout the subject jurisdiction. It ranges from 1 (for 100%) to 0 for nobody would need to move. It is simply a measurement tool, not a goal. Nobody actually thinks that integration is an even distribution of whites and blacks throughout a jurisdiction—and nowhere in the AFFH rule does HUD suggest it is. It’s just a measurement tool, albeit a lazy and inaccurate tool. It does not set any goals.
Mr. Romano is simply repeating the typical radical right wing fundamentalist Big Lies as perfected by his ideological predecessors in 1920s-1940s Germany. Genuine conservatives like Barry Goldwater or William F. Buckley are rolling over in their collective graves at how today’s so-called “conservatives” have gone off the deep end into a fantasy world of friendly fas*sm.
Why write crap like this: “Obama Wants A Thug In Every Neighborhood” as though Obama has something to do with setting any of the policy carried out by “his” administration.
I’m only writing it once so pay attention.
Obama is only the mouthpiece. He probably doesn’t even know what “his” policy will be until he’s briefed on it.
Until you understand this basic fact about what has happened to the United States you won’t be able to contribute to any kind of resolution of the fact that
your country has been taken over.
Remember that among all these “criminals” there are those who years ago underpaid federal taxes either by neglect or omission once in their life. I believe that these people deserve a second chance; they’re not all dug dealers. Let’s be fair now. Voting is regulated by the States. Almost all the States now return voting rights when the defendants are released from jail.
Barack Obama can be impeached for wearing ugly clothes if Congress wants to. It doesn’t accomplish anything. Bill Clinton was impeached. Barack Obama doesn’t appear to be communist, no. Marxist? I think not. He hasn’t done America much good, but he had the right problems identified, just the wrong solutions. No, I don’t believe he hates America. After all, he’s sending his daughter to college here and has bought his retirement home here.
This confirms what I always knew. Calling Obama the worst president in history are racists.
On Obama’s inauguration day many of the GOP power brokers got together in Washington D.C. and made a plan not to compromise or work with Obama, and even though millions of Americans were losing their jobs and homes, the GOP would stay united and be 100% opposed to any of Obama’s economic policies. Again, this was on the VERY 1st day of Obama’s presidency. The economy was ****ting the bed and because of politics the GOP refused to lift a finger to help Americans. It was party before country with the GOP, as usual.
The nation adjusting to a black president by necessity pulled back the veil to an existing racial divide and brought the issue back into the light. Combined with the militarization of police forces across the country and a media who focuses unequally on minorities being mishandled by law enforcement.
A year or so later, Mitch McConnell is on video video saying pretty much the same thing.
So when Republicans today revise history and lie by saying that Obama has a fake birth certificate, why do you think Donald Trump is their nominee?
That’s BS and a flat out lie.
You lot are a bunch of racist losers.
When you move into the hood over here… we have sex offender cluster housing, and we’re a dumping ground for the LA County jail.
LA released 1,500 drug offenders out…and they land here with a bus pass paid in full by LA. Oh and we’re a sanctuary city too. We got all the mandates you want, and plenty of drugs on the streets too. Gay prostitution? No problem!
So you better bring a big gun and arm everyone in your family, cuz We the People are mandating you to move in to our hood, PHX AZ!
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