by Tom DeWeese, American Policy Center, ©2024
(Jul. 11, 2024) — Does your family live in a home located in a single-family neighborhood of your choosing? A place where your kids are safe to play in the yard, you can enjoy the sun in your own lounge chair, the grill is ready to be fired up for dinner, and your neighbors wave hello? Best of all, are you counting on the equity value growing with each mortgage payment, preparing for your financial future?
This is your home, your investment, your quality of life!
Well, get ready to lose it all, because a growing movement believes your happiness and success is divisive, racist, and ignores the plight of others who just don’t have the same opportunities and privileges as you.
Over the past few years, in several states and communities there has been a drive to eliminate zoning protections for single family neighborhoods such as yours. Those zoning protections were designed to keep your neighborhood in the same shape as you found it. A street of matching home styles, and of equal value, free of apartment buildings and excess crowding of those designed for lower income living space.
As Smart Growth programs began to take control of planning policy in many cities across the nation, single-family neighborhoods became a special target. Of course, Smart Growth is about control of development, not personal choice. Its main focus is to move people out of the rural areas and suburbs into the inner cities. 15 minute cities! In such a plan there is no room for traditional two-story homes and yards. The new housing plan is for high rise apartments squeezed together in an urban setting where few cars are necessary as you walk or ride your bike to the store; and take public transportation to work. It’s all to protect the environment!
But how do you get people to accept such a major change in life? Create a crisis, of course. So today, we have a housing shortage! Proponents of the scheme declare, “We can put 100 families in the space of your house and yard that today only holds four people!”
The main question that must be asked is do we really have a housing shortage? If so, why? Aren’t home building companies able to keep up with demand for housing? And why aren’t homes affordable to the average American?
The answer is, we don’t have a housing shortage, we have a government interference problem. For the past several decades, the government has been working to limit home building. Urban Sprawl, they call it. To protect the environment, we can’t have housing developments spreading all over the place. So, many communities have put up Urban Growth Boundaries around the city and allow no growth outside that line. The poster child for this practice is Portland, Oregon. Over twenty years ago the city installed such a boundary and the restrictions have barely changed. But the population has grown by almost 80%. Now Portland has a housing crisis!
Meanwhile millions of illegal aliens are flooding our inner cities, and suddenly we have a national housing shortage. And why are homes no longer affordable? Massive inflation caused by government destruction of the value of the dollar is the real culprit. It’s a crisis caused by bad government – not zoning protections for homeowners. In fact, such home ownership used to be called the American Dream. Now it’s a crisis.
To make the stakes even higher in our new world of social equity, the mayor of Minneapolis declared that people living in zoning-protected single-family neighborhoods are actually self-segregating themselves from those they don’t want to live next to. He summed up the charge saying single-family neighborhoods are racist!
Biden’s so-called infrastructure program calls for the end of zoning protections for single-family neighborhoods, to be replaced by the installation of Section 8 public housing projects. And Congress voted big money for such a plan. To implement such a plan, city councils would need to apply for the federal grants supplied through the legislation. Many have done so, but such a process would take time and there is no guarantee that every city would do it. Another approach was needed.
That plan came in June, through the bold efforts of Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman and Delaware Representative Lisa Blunt Rochester. Together they introduced in both Houses of Congress the “Reducing Regulatory Barriers to Housing Act.” Now, instead of waiting for local communities to make the decision to move forward with the assault on community organization, Congress can now make it a law!
Read the rest here.
Tom DeWeese is President of the American Policy Center and National Grassroots Coordinator for CFACT (Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow) working to help local activists organize into Freedom Pods (www.CFACT.org). He is also the author of three books, including Now Tell Me I Was Wrong, ERASE, and Sustainable: the WAR on Free Enterprise, Private Property, and Individuals.