On Wednesday, President Donald Trump took a victory lap on his new fair housing policy, which he has said will preserve communities from progressive efforts to “abolish the suburbs.”
Writing with a developer’s sense of bombast, Trump took to Twitter to proclaim that people living out the “Suburban Lifestyle Dream” will “no longer be bothered or financially hurt by having low income housing built in your neighborhood.”
Last week, his administration scrapped an Obama-era regulation known as the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule, which was designed to better enforce the decades-old federal mandate to actively reduce racial segregation. The president’s message appeared to be a barely coded appeal to suburban “homevoters” — those property-owning members of the electorate who prioritize their housing investment when deciding political issues. “Your housing prices will go up based on the market, and crime will go down. I have rescinded the Obama-Biden AFFH Rule,” Trump wrote in the tweet, adding a cherry on top: “Enjoy!”
Over the past few weeks, Trump has been positioning the suburbs as the key to his chances for reelection. When it comes to housing segregation — or “neighborhood choice,” as the new rule puts it — the president is saying the quiet part out loud, through a bullhorn. When the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development first moved to revise the rule in 2017, officials said that the regulation was too burdensome. Housing Secretary Ben Carson published an op-ed this week underscoring his efforts to “tend the regulatory landscape.” Trump has instead articulated a clearer purpose, in the form of a promise to white suburban homeowners: His administration won’t require communities to break down the patterns of segregation that work to their advantage.
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