Biden intends to make housing a campaign issue, while hiding his true housing agenda.
Will Trump effectively expose that agenda?
A recent poll of voters in Maryland found that crime is the issue that concerns them the most. The second biggest issue of concern is affordable housing, but it lags well behind crime.
Which issue do you think the Washington Post highlighted in its report on the poll? You’re right — housing.
Crime is a losing issue for Democrats (and therefore for the Post). The Democrats think housing is a winner, at least in the upcoming election.
Why do Democrats believe the housing issue is a winner for them? Stanley Kurtz explains:
Biden has decided to make housing a major campaign issue. He and his advisers have concluded that rising housing costs are the main reason voters remain so down on the economy. Despite indications that inflation is easing around the edges, high rents and mortgage rates mean that inflation’s burden continues to weigh heavily on family budgets. Biden gets peppered with questions about housing costs whenever he ventures onto the hustings. All this has convinced him that addressing housing is the way to persuade voters that he feels their pain.
Biden is also persuaded that promising to solve the housing problem will distract from issues such as immigration and crime, where he’s at a disadvantage. Biden and his advisers see housing as an area in which Democrats have an edge — so long as they can keep the conversation on federal handouts and away from controversial topics like AFFH.
(Emphasis added)
Ah, AFFH. Longtime readers of Stanley’s work, and mine, will probably recognize these letters and understand why Democrats want to steer the housing conversation away from them.
Nominally, AFFH stands for “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing.” What it really stands for is war on the suburbs and on cars, and for the government telling us where to live.
AFFH stands for aggressive federal interference in local zoning decisions for the purpose of promoting left-wing goals. This means, for example, pushing people into high-density areas near public transportation hubs, so as to reduce the use of cars. It means building inexpensive housing units — apartment buildings and duplexes — in middle-class suburbs for the purpose of creating neighborhoods where low-income individuals and minority group members are represented to the degree the federal government deems “equitable.”
During the 2020 presidential election, Donald Trump warned a few times about the Democrats’ war on the suburbs. However, he never artfully articulated the danger, and the issue did not gain resonance in the campaign.
As president, Biden has, in Stanley’s words, cleverly kept AFFH in the background through his first term:
He has issued an “interim” rule reinstituting parts of AFFH but temporarily omitting the most burdensome and controversial demands on localities, punishments for municipalities that resist. The federal hammer will come down only when the full-blown AFFH rule is “finalized”— conveniently, just after the election.
Did Biden really need four years to fully reboot AFFH after President Trump put an end to the rule in 2020? This certainly seems like a politically motivated delay.
If Biden gets another term, AFFH will move to the foreground. Having campaigned on the need to solve the housing shortage, Biden and congressional Democrats will push his new housing plan —a big $20 billion “first-of-its-kind fund” to encourage planners to increase the housing supply.
Inevitably, strings will be attached. As Stanley explains:
Any state or locality that accepts even a dollar of federal housing funding must sign an agreement promising to “affirmatively further fair housing.” So any state or locality taking funds from the “new” pot of money would effectively be putting itself under the control of AFFH.
The result?
Any state or locality accepting federal housing funds of any kind will subject itself to a hyper-intrusive bureaucratic rule that demands demographic balance by race, ethnicity, country of origin, English language competency, and income level. AFFH also injects the feds into local decisions on roadbuilding, parking requirements, business-district development, placement of public transportation hubs, the development of parks, the drawing of school-district boundary lines, and more.
On top of that, promising to affirmatively further fair housing in order to obtain federal funds will subject municipalities to lawsuits from both the federal government and private groups under the strict terms of a fully revived AFFH. Notoriously, this is what happened to Westchester County, N.Y., under President Obama.
This regime is almost certain to produce a backlash. In fact, Stanley shows that a similar, but softer, regime imposed by the state government is already producing a backlash in liberal Massachusetts:
A 2021 state zoning law designed to densify Boston’s suburbs and push suburbanites out of their cars has set off a rebellion in the town of Milton, Mass. That revolt now appears to be spreading across the Greater Boston area.
In 2023, the politically progressive suburb of Newton voted out several councilors who pushed an aggressive AFFH-style zoning plan. And last February, the suburb of Milton called a referendum on the zoning plan developed under state pressure and rejected it after a bitter campaign.
If suburban Boston isn’t ready for dense housing and “transit oriented development,” it’s unlikely that the rest of America is.
But that won’t be Joe Biden’s problem. He won’t be running in 2028. If the housing issue helps him win in 2024, he can let the 2028 Democratic candidate worry about backlash. Meanwhile, the rest of us should worry about the policies that will produce the backlash.
Since Biden plans to make housing an issue in 2024, but without mentioning AFFH, it will be up to Trump to expose the Democrats’ hidden agenda and to argue against it more effectively than he did in 2020.
Doing so will open him up to the charge of racism (what else is new?). Trump shouldn’t be cowed by this prospect, but he should articulate the issue in ways that will make the charge difficult to stick. If he does so, the housing issue might give him a needed boost with suburban voters.
One last point. Libertarians tend not to like zoning restrictions. In fact, says Stanley:
[Some] reject even locally controlled zoning as unwarranted interference with market mechanisms and individual property rights. Given the current housing shortage and consequent rising prices, this has brought many libertarian and business-oriented conservatives into partnership with the sort of leftist housing activists who are actively hostile to America’s leafy, prosperous, single-family-zoned suburbs.
But, as Stanley points out, there is nothing particularly libertarian about zoning takeovers by the federal government (or by Massachusetts). Nor is it libertarian to impose housing patterns designed to force people to stop driving their cars.
The housing debate will be won by the party and candidates who do the best job of framing the issue. Democrats are prepared to frame it in their favor. Trump is usually a master framer. Perhaps he will he able to frame the housing issue in his favor this time.