If you saved your money and bought a house in the suburbs, your investment and lifestyle are under attack. President Joe Biden is pushing to end single-family zoning. The biggest item in Biden’s infrastructure bill, now being negotiated with Congress, is $213 billion he claims will to increase affordable housing. Biden wants to put the federal government in charge of zoning and distribute apartment buildings throughout single-family home neighborhoods.
That $213 billion is nearly twice the spending on roads and bridges. It will change towns everywhere and torpedo the American dream of a house with a patch of lawn.
Biden’s plan should be called “hypocrisy housing.” Its backers are hypocrites. Biden himself owns a four-acre lakefront home in upscale Greenville, Delaware, where there is absolutely no public housing, affordable housing or rentals that accept housing vouchers. And don’t expect any to be built next door to the Bidens.
Biden has always had a passion for stately homes and swanky addresses, even buying a 10,000 square foot mansion that once belonged to the DuPont family. Not exactly the image of “Middle-Class Joe.”
Vice President Kamala Harris and her husband own a $5 million gated home on a street of expensive single-family homes in Brentwood, California. That reeks of privilege.
President Barack Obama launched his Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing program in 2015 to ensure that every neighborhood includes housing for low-income buyers and renters and public transportation.
Yet, for their own family, the Obamas bought an $11.75 million Martha’s Vineyard mansion on 29 waterfront acres. Martha’s Vineyard is critically short of affordable housing, according to a public report, but that didn’t stop them.
These politicians love single-family zoning and exclusivity for themselves, but not for the rest of us. The poster person for this hypocrisy is avowed Marxist Patrisse Khan-Cullors, the Black Lives Matter activist who purchased a home in exclusive Topanga Canyon, part of Los Angeles.
The U.S. has a housing shortage. But many municipalities are already dealing with it. They don’t need Washington, D.C., strong-arming local decision-makers.
That’s what Biden’s plan does. The bill creates a gigantic pot of taxpayer funds to hand out to towns that surrender self-rule.
That’s a mistake. Local control is vital. Towns can take into account the availability of public transportation, school capacity and proximity to employment. Uncle Sam has no clue.
Advocates for federal control argue that if anyone can afford a neighborhood, everyone should be able to afford it. That means locating apartment clusters even way out on country roads. Bus routes and bus shelters would have to be built. Roads have to be widened to accommodate traffic, and sewers and water lines are needed. Say goodbye to country living.
Advocates for abolishing zoning mock suburbanites for worrying about home values. But for most people, their home is their biggest investment, and they waited years to afford it.
Local control allows them to be part of the solution. Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms is pushing to end single-family zoning, while her opponents warn that increasing density will strain schools and transportation and require cutting down the “tree canopy” over the city’s older neighborhoods. Atlantans will decide.
Other communities are building in-town housing for young working people and seniors while allowing homeowners to build accessory apartments for extended family or renters.
Biden’s proposals to make housing affordable are laughable. He calls for “putting union-building trade workers to work” to “save families money.” Right, as if mandating union-only labor has ever been a money saver.
Instead, he should remove the tariff on lumber. Costs are up 300% in a little over a year.
Biden is also proposing a first-time homebuyer’s tax credit of up to $15,000 that buyers can receive at time of purchase, rather than when they file taxes. Paying people to buy homes will push up housing prices. The same way federal college aid and loans have pushed up tuitions.
Biden’s plan won’t expand the American dream. It’s what will kill it.
Betsy McCaughey is a former lieutenant governor of New York and author of “The Next Pandemic,” available at Amazon.com. Contact her at [email protected] or on Twitter @Betsy_McCaughey. To find out more about Betsy McCaughey and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.
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Biden and his mindless brain controllers of forced American equity are determined to turn successful property enabled self-governing individual Americans who have the will and means to defy they and their collectives of failures, into equally poor disenfranchised government dependents. They have already succeeded in disenfranchising us from our votes, and now seek to complete the job by crowding us out of our safe zones and protective property. Their mindless economic driven COVID controlled policies have already driven the price of lumber almost past the point of affordable desirable housing and safe neighborhoods ever again being built, just their affordable cement prison public housing outhouses where crime is not the exception but the rule. Just one more assault on the American dream in an attempt to impose their socialist nightmare of an Orwellian life of rule by the social elites in bed with the high-tech mind manipulator enforcers. The more they promise more Union labor, the more cash paid under the table illegal workers they import to undermine the wage structures. Only a blind man would tgrust them.
They are determined to RUIN THE US at any cost.. Just not TO THEMSELVES>
I wonder how all of the suburban housewives, who voted for Biden, are going to like public housing in the suburbs? How is high crime and drugs going to work out for you and your kids, suburban housewives?
I wonder, how many would TAKE THEIR VOTE BACK, if they could!
Mind you, he and the political elite will still have their mansion(s). Need to put him in a tiny house smack in the middle of nowhere.
Did you ever see that film, the Super (with Joe Pesci)? IMO That should be done to EVERYONE Of these demon-rats.. MAKE THEM LIVE IN section 8 housing, WITHOUT GUARDS…
Limited home ownership is a key part of the Marxist agenda. The only people who should own a home or a nice condo are those in leadership positions. The proletariat needs to live in sub quality housing where they can be watched, turn their neighbors in, and not have ownership or tasks that take them away from serving the state.
This isn’t about creating affordable living for minorities it is about destroying communities and creating more conflict and hate. If they REALLY cared about affordable housing in safe neighborhoods (which I believe is a good and right goal) they’d work to make the places where people of lower means live safe, clean, and attractive to live in.
That’s right affordable means public housing in your Neighborhood. But will Joe or Nancy or even Maxine waters ever put public housing in their Neighborhood ??
The city of Augusta Georgia has been Revitalizing the hood for 15 or more years. They have built Affordable housing with Granite countertops. And they still have violence in the Neighborhood.
Not only no, but HELL NO.