In 1972, New York city proposed to build low-income housing in the Queens neighborhood of Forest Hills. Residents pushed back, fearing crime, lower property values and "white flight." A young attorney named Mario Cuomo helped craft a deal that let the project proceed.
This past week, Trump said that Biden would abolish suburbs. He referred to Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH), a legal requirement that federal agencies and federal grantees further the purposes of the Fair Housing Act.
Remarks by President Trump in Press Conference, July 14, 2020:
Abolish — in the suburbs, you’re going to abolish the suburbs with this. Enforce Obama-Biden’s radical AFFH — that’s the AFFH regulation that threatens to strip localities of federal affordable housing funds unless they change their zoning laws to fit the federal government’s demands. So what you have — I mean, I’ve been watching this for years in Westchester, coming from New York. They want low-income housing built in a neighborhood.
Well, I’m ending that rule. I’m taking it out, so — I spoke with Ben Carson the other day. We’re going to be taking it out. I’ve watched that whole thing go, and now they want to make it twice as bad in the suburbs — in the suburbs.
Mothers aren’t happy about that. Fathers aren’t happy about that. They worked hard to buy a house, and now they’re going to watch the housing values drop like a rock, and that has happened. It dropped like a rock. So we’re not going to do that; we’re going to do the exact opposite.Two days later, he said:
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.
