Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Ben Carson, fed-up with the media’s portrayal of the Trump administration as racist for reversing the 2015 Obama-Biden program titled “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing” (AFFH), fired back, “I’ve grown to expect little in the way of analysis or truth from most of the media.”
In an interview with Just the News, Carson continued, “So many of them said that our policy is racist, and we’re trying to keep suburbs white and silly stuff like that. You know, they don’t know the facts. They don’t know that 52% of African Americans live in the suburbs, that 60% of Hispanics live in the suburbs, 62% of Asian Americans live in the suburbs.”
“What we’re saying is the suburbs—and the people who are responsible at the local level—can run it any way they want, they can build whatever they want, but let them do it, not the federal government,” Carson added. “Because we want people doing things who are responsible to the voters, and therefore will work in a way that makes sense in their various localities.”
Matt Schuck, HUD’s director of strategic communications, said that analysis of the top 100 most populated metropolitan areas found 52% of African Americans live in the suburbs, as well as 60% of Hispanics, and 62% of Asian Americans. The 52% figure was also given by Alana Samuels in a 2016 article in The Atlantic when she referenced the Brookings Institution’s Elizabeth Kneebone; she stated, “Today, the majority—52 percent—of African Americans in the nation’s top 100 metro areas live in the suburbs of those regions, according to Kneebone. In 2000, the majority—55 percent—of African Americans in the 100 largest metro areas lived in the big cities that anchor those regions.”
Just the News cited urbanist Richard Florida writing in a 2019 Bloomberg article: “Today’s suburbs no longer look much like the lily-white places portrayed on 1950s and 1960s sitcoms …”
On July 29, President Trump tweeted, “I am happy to inform all of the people living their Suburban Lifestyle Dream that you will no longer be bothered or financially hurt by having low income housing built in your neighborhood … your housing prices will go up based on the market, and crime will go down. I have rescinded the Obama-Biden AFFH Rule. Enjoy!”
New York Post columnist Betsy McCaughey described the AFFH in the New York Post, tying it to Joe Biden as she stated:
The ex-veep wants to ramp up an Obama-era social engineering scheme called Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) that mercifully barely got underway before President Trump took office, vowing to stop it. Biden’s plan is to force suburban towns with single-family homes and minimum lot sizes to build high-density affordable housing smack in the middle of their leafy neighborhoods — local preferences and local control be damned…
Biden and the equality warriors are using accusations of racism to accomplish something different. Their message is: You worked and saved to move to the suburbs, but you can’t have that way of life unless everyone else can, too.