Obama’s Neighborhood Race-Watch Program
By Matthew Vadum
President Obama is quietly moving forward with a plan to use your tax dollars to loot American suburbs in order to help Democrats and fund their corrupt big-city political machines.
The new plan from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to use federal housing policy to uproot and change American neighborhoods is part of Obama’s effort at “fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” Long ago Democrats declared war on the suburbs and rural areas because, among other things, they tend to be Republican strongholds.
HUD is the right vehicle for this scheme because its bureaucracy is adept at telling people how to live and where to live. It tells cities they are racially out of balance and pressures them to change their zoning to allow more “affordable housing” so communities have the politically correct mixture of economic development and racial diversity.
HUD, by the way, ought to stand for the Department of Homewrecking and Utopian Development.
Ripping apart the suburbs and throwing them back together under the guidance of central planners and bureaucrats would be done in the name of “fairness” and “diversity,” the twin obsessions that haunt the psyche of the modern leftist. Instead of letting market forces and individual choices determine where people live, these statists want to boss people around, using the heavy hand of the government to force a perverse version of economic and racial integration onto neighborhoods.
It’s not fair that some people live in nicer, safer, wealthier neighborhoods than other people, whines HUD’s far-left secretary, Shaun Donovan.
He claims there is a huge divide in the nation that could be termed “the tyranny of the ZIP code.” This specious doctrine holds that if you live in the right ZIP code, you have greater access to opportunities, and greater chances of success. Individual initiative, drive, and ingenuity don’t count, according to this line of thinking,
