Biden’s Infrastructure Bill Aims to End Single-Family Zoning

Woodland Park CO

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With the introduction of his massive, $2.3 trillion “infrastructure” bill, President Biden’s campaign to end suburban single-family zoning has begun. If you think this issue was debated and resolved during the 2020 presidential campaign, you are mistaken. It’s true that Biden’s campaign platform openly and unmistakably pledged to abolish single-family zoning. As soon as President Trump made an issue of that pledge, however, Biden went virtually silent on the issue and the Democrat-supporting press falsely denied that Biden had any designs on single-family zoning at all. Now that he’s president, Biden’s infrastructure bill openly includes programs designed to “eliminate” single-family zoning (which Biden calls “exclusionary zoning”). How, exactly, does Biden plan to end single-family zoning? According to the fact sheet released by the White House, “Biden is calling on Congress to enact an innovative new competitive grant program that awards flexible and attractive funding to jurisdictions that take concrete steps to eliminate [‘exclusionary zoning’].” In other words, Biden wants to use a big pot of federal grant money as bait. If a county or municipality agrees to weaken or eliminate its single-family zoning, it gets the federal bucks. The wildly overreaching Obama-Biden era Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) regulation — which Biden has pledged to revive — works in a similar fashion. The difference is that by adding another gigantic pot of federal money to the Community Development Block Grants that are the lure of AFFH, Biden makes it that much harder for suburbs to resist applying — and that much more punishing to jurisdictions that forgo a share of the federal taxes they’ve already paid so as to protect their right to self-rule. Are federal carrots enough, however? Prosperous suburbs may forgo the grants in an effort to secure their independence. The success of Biden’s initiative depends in part on exactly how much money gets allocated to grants tied to zoning reform. The details of that ask haven’t yet been released, but the $213 billion allocated to Biden’s total affordable housing initiative leave room for an awfully big pot for the anti-zoning portion. If there aren’t enough carrots, however, how about sticks? During the campaign, Biden backed a draconian plan to withhold federal transportation grants for road repair from suburbs that refuse to kill off single-family zoning. That hasn’t been proposed by Biden, and the reason is fairly obvious. Democrats don’t yet have the votes to pass such a law. The only way they can get around the filibuster is to squeak spending bills through Congress under the rules on “reconciliation.” So, for now, it’s carrots all the way down. If Senate Dems expand their majority and kill the filibuster in 2022, however, out come the sticks and down goes suburban zoning. There’s more danger in store for America’s suburbs in Biden’s current proposal than meets the eye, however. If I were administering Biden’s various federal housing programs, I would sucker well-off suburbs into accepting grants on lenient terms. The trick is that once a jurisdiction accepts a HUD grant, it has to sign a statement promising to “affirmatively further fair housing.” Now that Biden is going to revive the old Obama-Biden AFFH rule, that pledge can be used by activist non-profits or the administration itself to sue localities for failing to meet the outrageously expanded definition of that term set forth in Obama’s AFFH. It was suits like this that dragged Westchester County, New York through years of federal control and torment. Just the threat of such suits intimidated Democratic officials in Dubuque, Iowa into surrendering their city’s self-rule to the Obama administration. Here’s the bottom line: Biden’s campaign to abolish suburban single-family zoning has well and truly begun. As during the Obama era, it will likely escalate in intensity with each passing year. At this point, any jurisdiction in the country that wants to keep control of its zoning and development should decline to apply for federal housing grants. No matter how good the money looks, sign that promise to “affirmatively further fair housing” — as the Biden administration will define it — and you are signing away your birthright. There’s a pattern here. Biden and the Democrats are working overtime to undermine the federalist system in which zoning and education are local concerns. In each case — housing and education — the plan is the same: use federal grants to hook states and localities into conditions that will effectively override their authority. Kill suburban zoning and force leftist action civics and critical race theory on red-state schools. Siphon off taxes and return the money to taxpayers with conditions that effectively gut the foundational layer of our federalist system — the layer closest to the people. ALWAYS FOLLOW THE MONEY!!! YOUR TAX $$$