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Trump Hammers Biden And Dems: They Will ‘Totally Destroy The Beautiful Suburbs’

"People have worked all their lives to get into a community, and now they’re going to watch it go to hell. Not going to happen, not while I’m here.”

   DailyWire.com
U.S. President Donald Trump speaks on the South Lawn of the White House on July 16, 2020 in Washington, DC.
Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images

Speaking on the South Lawn of the White House on Thursday, President Trump fired a barrage at the Democrats and their presumptive presidential candidate Joe Biden regarding suburbs around the country. “People have worked all their lives to get into a community, and now they’re going to watch it go to hell,” said Trump. “Not going to happen, not while I’m here.”

Trump began by pointing out that Democrats want to change zoning regulations, asserting, “The Democrats in D.C. have been and want to, at a much higher level, abolish our beautiful and successful suburbs by placing far-left Washington bureaucrats in charge of local zoning decisions. They are absolutely determined to eliminate single-family zoning, destroy the value of houses and communities already built, just as they have in Minneapolis and other locations that you read about today. Your home will go down in value and crime rates will rapidly rise.”

Then Trump turned to Biden: “Joe Biden and his bosses from the radical Left want to significantly multiply what they’re doing now. And what will be the end result is you will totally destroy the beautiful suburbs. Suburbia will be no longer as we know it. So they wanted to defund and abolish your police and law enforcement while at the same time destroying our great suburbs.”

Trump promised, “The suburb destruction will end with us. Next week, I will be discussing the AFFH rule — AFFH rule, a disaster — and our plans to protect the suburbs from being obliterated by Washington Democrats, by people on the far Left that want to see the suburbs destroyed, that don’t care. People have worked all their lives to get into a community, and now they’re going to watch it go to hell. Not going to happen, not while I’m here.”

In 2015, the Obama administration’s Department of Housing and Urban Development announced a final rule on Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing.

Stanley Kurtz took note of the Obama administration’s targeting of suburbs in a piece for National Review in 2015:

AFFH is easily one of President Obama’s most radical initiatives, on a par with Obamacare in its transformative potential. In effect, AFFH gives the federal government a lever to re-engineer nearly every American neighborhood — imposing a preferred racial and ethnic composition, densifying housing, transportation, and business development in suburb and city alike, and weakening or casting aside the authority of local governments over core responsibilities, from zoning to transportation to education. …

[T]he real story of AFFH is the attempt to force integration by class, to densify development in American suburbs and cities, and to undo America’s system of local government and replace it with a ‘regional’ alternative that turns suburbs into helpless satellites of large cities. Once HUD gets its hooks into a municipality, no policy area is safe. Zoning, transportation, education, all of it risks slipping into the control of the federal government and the new, unelected regional bodies the feds will empower. Over time, AFFH could spell the end of the local democracy that Alexis de Tocqueville rightly saw as the foundation of America’s liberty and distinctiveness.

In early 2020, the Trump administration said it was issuing a new AFFH rule, stating it “offers clearer guidance to states and local governments to help them improve affordable housing choices in their community.”

HUD Secretary Ben Carson said the new rule eliminated the federal mandate to address systemic housing discrimination and it would permit local officials to supervise housing efforts. “Mayors know their communities best, so we are empowering them to make housing decisions that meet their unique needs, not a mandate from the federal government,” said Carson.

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