The Foolish Wisdom of Cities

by Smith Young,

HUD and DPS want it both ways

In an attempt to provide affordable low income housing everywhere the Department of Housing and Urban Development, HUD, city policy makers, and even educators, i.e., in Denver Public Schools, DPS, want to force integration by attracting minorities to the suburbs while attracting whites into the ghettos (term “ghetto” is language used in Dallas lawsuit).  This may sound wacko and it’s not what civil rights groups are thinking; they just haven’t figured out what they’re doing yet.

Empowered by the Obama administration’s agenda and now legitimized by the Supreme Court’s recent ruling on Disparate Impact, cities are becoming their own worst enemy, but the zest for change does not contain the damage they are doing within their own city limits.  Obama’s effective suppression of the free enterprise system and local government autonomy is just beginning to expose the failure of AFFH artificially trying to prop up and control the migration of the poor within and around ghetto’s, with a disastrous rebellion brewing in the suburbs.

Similar segregation problems are identified in the examples below for both Denver and Dallas, albeit driven by opposite complaints. Denver’s is seeking a solution for its segregation problem within the city while Dallas is seeking a solution for migration from the city to the suburbs.  These two cities effectively describes the same integration problem within the city (Denver), and between the city and the suburbs (Dallas).  The paradox is that while both Denver and Dallas are complaining about the same segregation problem in the city; Dallas is the city that was receiving benefits for affordable housing developers in the ghetto (at the expense of the suburbs).  It doesn’t seem to matter that there’s not much difference between both ghetto’s; that they both receive subsidies, Dallas just found a way to blame and engage HUD in a nationwide war against the suburbs.

·            Denver

Tom Boasberg, School Superintendent for DPS, in a recent Denver Post article, click: “Integration still matters“, points out that “DPS remains more segregated today than at the end of busing two decades ago”.

“In many Denver neighborhoods, if you put a compass point down on the map and draw a very small radius out from it, such as a half mile, you will not often find a lot of racial and economic diversity within that circle. But if you take that compass and draw a little further, such as a 1½ mile radius, that larger circle is far more likely to be more diverse.”

·            Dallas

Now reconcile the above Denver segregation issue with the Supreme Court decision, click: “Supreme Court vs. Neighborhood Segregation“, to solve the Dallas problem based on a case by the Inclusive Communities Project, a Dallas non-profit that promotes racial and socioeconomic integration and sued the Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs over the way the department allocated housing tax credits. Between 1995 and 2009, the state did not award tax credits for any family units in predominantly white census tracts, and instead gave tax credits to locations marked as ghettos with its segregated overcrowded living conditions, inherently unequal schools, unemployment and underemployment, appalling mortality and health statistics.

The Supreme Court recently ruled in favor of the Dallas integration solution supporting migration to the suburbs that HUD is now using to impose a new HUD rule using a tool for recipients of grants (bribes) seeking to eliminate racial imbalances.

The Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing, AFFH, Rule

HUD’s new AFFH rule is ultimately the regulation that “amounts to back-door annexation, a way of turning America’s suburbs into tributaries of nearby cities” as best explained by Stanley Kurtz, click: “Attention America’s Suburbs: You Have Just Been Annexed”.

However, the issue with this oxymoron perspective of cities is the injustice on one hand of cities getting rewarded with HUD’s mandatory involvement in the local government planning of suburbs (propped up by the 1968 Fair Housing Act).  On the other hand the same rule is not being applied to force changes that will legitimately attract whites to segregated neighborhoods within a city like Denver.  Instead, cities like Denver are doing the opposite, funding the expansion of low income affordable housing which will further drive away whites and expand the pockets of segregation.