President Barack Obama leans in to kiss Massachusetts senatorial candidate Elizabeth Warren after she introduced Obama before he addresses supporters during a June campaign fundraiser at Symphony Hall in Boston. (Photo: Stephan Savoia/AP)
In July 2015, the Obama administration released proposed rules aimed at diversifying white neighborhoods and putting a stop to so-called “segregated living patterns” around the nation. In April 2016, the Obama administration sent out a stern warning to landlords around the country, telling them they couldn’t automatically turn away convicted felons because doing so could be perceived as racial discrimination – the logic being too many blacks and minorities are unfairly imprisoned as it is.
And now?
As Paul Sperry with the New York Post found, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro is setting in motion a means to divert Section 8 housing funding to rich areas – read, predominantly Caucasian – and give financially strapped homeowner hopefuls “mobility counselors” who can help find them the McMansions of their dreams. As Sperry noted – this, even as a “similar program tested a few years ago in Dallas has been blamed for shifting violent crime to affluent neighborhoods.”
From a macro-perspective, these recent regulatory moves demonstrate exactly why the government and housing don’t mix – the larger the federal role, the littler the individual freedom. Once government comes in, unfettered free markets go out, and in all matters of real estate, it’d be worthwhile to apply Ronald Reagan’s famous quip: the government is not the solution to the problem; the government is the problem. Developers, renters, landlords and buyers ought to make the decision on what to build and what and where to buy, not the bureaucrats in Washington, D.C.
But from a micro-perspective, the issue becomes even cloudier – and darker.
What’s going on at HUD is simply a reflection of President Obama’s own biases, and his personal crusade to right what he perceives as a wrong – the failure of white America to justly treat black America.
We saw this in Obama’s first presidency when he called out a white Cambridge police officer for “acting stupidly” during the arrest of a black Harvard University professor for disorderly conduct, and likening the event to America’s “long history” of “disproportionately” stopping “African Americans and Latinos” for law enforcement matters — despite admitting in the same breath he didn’t know “all the facts” of the event.
We saw this in Obama’s second presidency when he furthered the Black Lives Matter mantra — which was based on a lie about how a white Ferguson, Missouri, police officer ultimately shot and killed a black teenage suspect — to the point of ordering his Justice Department to investigate and oversee police departments around the nation, all the while saying the “African American community is not just making this up” about discriminatory cops.
Now we’re seeing that same attitude played at HUD – and it goes something like this: Suburbs are white because the white powers-who-be purposely keep out blacks and other minorities. And it’s going to take Obama and the federal government to level the playing field and bring about a socially just resolution.
Or, as Rush Limbaugh just put it, in his apt analysis: It’s all about the control.
“This is more regulation from Housing and Urban Development – faceless, nameless bureaucrats, bringing inner city dwellers into your suburban neighborhood,” Limbaugh said, during a recent radio broadcast. “It’s already been established by government’s own studies to be disastrous … but that’s not going to stop them from doing it anyway, because that’s the objective, when you get right down to it. They don’t care. They don’t care about the circumstances of people. They care about having power over people.”
Forget the notion of a home being a homeowner’s castle. Forget the idea of private property rights being sacrosanct, and once they’re not, doors to tyranny crack open. Forget the Constitution and the failure of that sacred text to contain any authorities for HUD and the executive to assume these housing market authorities – or for HUD to exist, for that matter. This is free market America, Obama style, and what that means for the average homeowner, home renter, developer, mortgager and landlord is this: Social justice trumps all. And while all Americans have rights, some Americans have a little bit more rights than others.
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