2 houses
© www.timesunion.comMandate: Neighborhoods will change.
Earlier this month, the Obama administration quietly issued new rules to the Fair Housing Act that will radically alter the way your neighborhood looks. The Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Rule (AFFH) will change zoning laws, redefine neighborhoods, control transportation and business development, and remove the authority of state and local governments in the areas of zoning, transportation and education.

President Obama's Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) regulation will redefine the American landscape, forcing radical changes to suburban and rural cities around the United States, as the federal government gets ready to take over and redefine the American Suburb. Under the guise of equality, the Obama administration is yet again using racial animosity to push their agenda, this time by annexing American Suburbs and filling them with low-income housing projects. Under the AFFH regulations, the Obama administration has given the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) the task of remaking America.


Comment: MSM New York Times reports: The new effort aims to encourage affordable housing development in more desirable neighborhoods, and to improve the housing stock in lower-income areas...The new rules are an effort to enforce the goals of the civil rights-era fair housing law that bans overt residential discrimination, but whose broader mandate for communities to actively foster integration has not been realized.

Sounds lofty, is it?


Any local jurisdiction that receives HUD funding must now conduct a detailed analysis of its housing occupancy by race, ethnicity, national origin, English proficiency, class, and a whole slew of government data points that will be housed in a national database. These data points will be used by HUD to map every US neighborhood by four racial groups — White, Asian, Black or African-American, and Hispanic/Latino — and publish "geospatial data" pinpointing racial imbalances.


Comment: ...zip code by zip code

The New York Times: Housing and Urban Development will make available a trove of data that local officials can use in deciding how they will address segregation and racially concentrated areas of poverty, rather than being told how they must meet the new goals.

And, from The Hill: "They're shifting money from poor neighborhoods into wealthy suburban areas. Who's that going to hurt?" The 377-page housing rule will be phased in over time, beginning in 30 days.

Compare this to the New York Post: Mortgage contracts won't be the only financial records vacuumed up by the database. According to federal documents, the repository will include "all credit lines," from credit cards to student loans to car loans — anything reported to credit bureaus. This is even more information than the IRS collects. (includes credit scores and employment records)

The FHFA (Federal Housing Finance Agency) will also pry into your personal assets and debts and whether you have any bankruptcies. The agency even wants to know the square footage and lot size of your home, as well as your interest rate. FHFA will share the info with Obama's brainchild, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which acts more like a civil-rights agency, aggressively investigating lenders for racial bias. The FHFA has offered no clear explanation as to why the government wants to sweep up so much sensitive information on Americans, other than stating it's for "research" and "policymaking." "We will be better able to identify possible discriminatory lending patterns."

(Don't lawsuits unequivocally indicate this? And, we aren't buying those Research and Policymaking justifiers. They have already made the policy without the data.)


Grantees must then identify factors (such as zoning laws, public-housing admissions criteria, and "lack of regional collaboration") that account for any imbalance in living patterns. Localities must also list "community assets" (such as quality schools, transportation hubs, parks, and jobs) and explain any disparities in access to such assets by race, ethnicity, national origin, English proficiency, class, and more.

Once these localities complete the demographic studies, they must then submit a plan of action that addresses any demographic imbalances in the region. Federally funded cities deemed overly segregated will be forced to change zoning laws, provide subsidized housing in affluent areas, and change the makeup of racial distribution or density in residential areas.

Suburbs and small towns will literally be forced to import minority and low-income populations into their localities in the name of equality and social engineering. New "high-density housing developments" will need to be built to house these people, and soon the suburbs will look exactly like the cities suburban residents tried to flee.

Perhaps one of the most disturbing parts of the AFFH is the fact that the federal government will use this data to literally blackmail cities into submission.

All of the data collected as part of these equality assessments will be housed in a giant government database, and President Obama intends on making that database available to lawyers and civil rights groups. These groups will have direct access to the agency's sophisticated mapping software, and will participate in city plans to re-engineer neighborhoods under new community outreach requirements.

"By opening this data to everybody, everyone in a community can weigh in," Obama said. "If you want affordable housing nearby, now you'll have the data you need to make your case."


Comment: New York Post: A key part of President Obama's legacy will be the fed's unprecedented collection of sensitive data on Americans by race. The government is prying into our most personal information at the most local levels, all for the purpose of "racial and economic justice." Unbeknown to most Americans, Obama's racial bean counters are furiously mining data on their health, home loans, credit cards, places of work, neighborhoods, even how their kids are disciplined in school — all to document "inequalities" between minorities and whites. This Orwellian-style stockpile of statistics includes a vast and permanent network of discrimination databases, which Obama already is using to make "disparate impact" cases.


Through the AFFH rule, HUD will force suburbs to import low-income populations and build new high-density housing developments. National Review's Stanley Kurtz explains:
[B]y obligating all localities receiving HUD funding to compare their demographics to the region as a whole, AFFH effectively nullifies municipal boundaries. Even with no allegation or evidence of intentional discrimination, the mere existence of a demographic imbalance in the region as a whole must be remedied by a given suburb. Suburbs will literally be forced to import population from elsewhere, at their own expense and in violation of their own laws. In effect, suburbs will have been annexed by a city-dominated region, their laws suspended and their tax money transferred to erstwhile non-residents. And to make sure the new high-density housing developments are close to "community assets" such as schools, transportation, parks, and jobs, bedroom suburbs will be forced to develop mini-downtowns. In effect, they will become more like the cities their residents chose to leave in the first place.
A Ban on Home Ownership and Single Family Homes?

If you live in a nice single family home neighborhood, you may soon find yourself in a neighborhood you barely recognize; even worse, you may soon find yourself homeless because HUD just rezoned your land to build a whole block of Section 8 apartment buildings.

Sound farfetched? Well it's already happening across the country. In fact, this is exactly what has been going on in liberal cities like Seattle for decades.

Last week, I wrote an article about how Seattle Mayor Ed Murray's advisory committee on housing was drafting a set of rules that would ban single-family zoning in Seattle. In the name of "equality", Seattle is taking this Obama administration's fair housing framework and is actually trying to ban single family homes because they are somehow racist.

As I've noted numerous times in the past, this is not a conspiracy theory; these things are happening, and they are happening at an increasing pace. [...] From giant corporations using eminent domain to steal people's homes, to the federal government using the Department of Homeland Security and the EPA to muscle people off their land, it seems freedom loving Americans are under attack from every direction.