HUD Housing Settlement Agreement/ Affirmative Furthering Fair Housing Rule - Different perspectives on HUD social engineering.

Data-driven government: A new approach to governing (A data driven Police State future)

Obama collecting personal data for a secret race database

By Paul Sperry

July 18, 2015 | 4:00pm

A key part of President Obama’s legacy will be the fed’s unprecedented collection of sensitive data on Americans by race. The government is prying into our most personal information at the most local levels, all for the purpose of “racial and economic justice.”

Unbeknown to most Americans, Obama’s racial bean counters are furiously mining data on their health, home loans, credit cards, places of work, neighborhoods, even how their kids are disciplined in school — all to document “inequalities” between minorities and whites.

This Orwellian-style stockpile of statistics includes a vast and permanent network of discrimination databases, which Obama already is using to make “disparate impact” cases against: banks that don’t make enough prime loans to minorities; schools that suspend too many blacks; cities that don’t offer enough Section 8 and other low-income housing for minorities; and employers who turn down African-Americans for jobs due to criminal backgrounds.

Big Brother Barack wants the databases operational before he leaves office, and much of the data in them will be posted online.

So civil-rights attorneys and urban activist groups will be able to exploit them to show patterns of “racial disparities” and “segregation,” even if no other evidence of discrimination exists.

OBAMA IS PRESIDING OVER THE LARGEST CONSOLIDATION OF PERSONAL DATA IN US HISTORY.

Housing database

The granddaddy of them all is the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing database, which the Department of Housing and Urban Development rolled out earlier this month to racially balance the nation, ZIP code by ZIP code. It will map every US neighborhood by four racial groups — white, Asian, black or African-American, and Hispanic/Latino — and publish “geospatial data” pinpointing racial imbalances.

The agency proposes using nonwhite populations of 50% or higher as the threshold for classifying segregated areas.

Federally funded cities deemed overly segregated will be pressured to change their zoning laws to allow construction of more subsidized housing in affluent areas in the suburbs, and relocate inner-city minorities to those predominantly white areas. HUD’s maps, which use dots to show the racial distribution or density in residential areas, will be used to select affordable-housing sites.

HUD plans to drill down to an even more granular level, detailing the proximity of black residents to transportation sites, good schools, parks and even supermarkets. If the agency’s social engineers rule the distance between blacks and these suburban “amenities” is too far, municipalities must find ways to close the gap or forfeit federal grant money and face possible lawsuits for housing discrimination.

Civil-rights groups will have access to the agency’s sophisticated mapping software, and will participate in city plans to re-engineer neighborhoods under new community outreach requirements.

“By opening this data to everybody, everyone in a community can weigh in,” Obama said. “If you want affordable housing nearby, now you’ll have the data you need to make your case.”

Mortgage database

Meanwhile, the Federal Housing Finance Agency, headed by former Congressional Black Caucus leader Mel Watt, is building its own database for racially balancing home loans. The so-called National Mortgage Database Project will compile 16 years of lending data, broken down by race, and hold everything from individual credit scores and employment records.

Mortgage contracts won’t be the only financial records vacuumed up by the database. According to federal documents, the repository will include “all credit lines,” from credit cards to student loans to car loans — anything reported to credit bureaus. This is even more information than the IRS collects.

The FHFA will also pry into your personal assets and debts and whether you have any bankruptcies. The agency even wants to know the square footage and lot size of your home, as well as your interest rate.

FHFA will share the info with Obama’s brainchild, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which acts more like a civil-rights agency, aggressively investigating lenders for racial bias.

The FHFA has offered no clear explanation as to why the government wants to sweep up so much sensitive information on Americans, other than stating it’s for “research” and “policymaking.”

However, CFPB Director Richard Cordray was more forthcoming, explaining in a recent talk to the radical California-based Greenlining Institute: “We will be better able to identify possible discriminatory lending patterns.”

Credit database

CFPB is separately amassing a database to monitor ordinary citizens’ credit-card transactions. It hopes to vacuum up some 900 million credit-card accounts — all sorted by race — representing roughly 85% of the US credit-card market. Why? To sniff out “disparities” in interest rates, charge-offs and collections.

Employment database

CFPB also just finalized a rule requiring all regulated banks to report data on minority hiring to an Office of Minority and Women Inclusion. It will collect reams of employment data, broken down by race, to police diversity on Wall Street as part of yet another fishing expedition.

School database

Through its mandatory Civil Rights Data Collection project, the Education Department is gathering information on student suspensions and expulsions, by race, from every public school district in the country. Districts that show disparities in discipline will be targeted for reform.

Those that don’t comply will be punished. Several already have been forced to revise their discipline policies, which has led to violent disruptions in classrooms.

Obama’s educrats want to know how many blacks versus whites are enrolled in gifted-and-talented and advanced placement classes.

Schools that show blacks and Latinos under-enrolled in such curricula, to an undefined “statistically significant degree,” could open themselves up to investigation and lawsuits by the department’s Civil Rights Office.

Count on a flood of private lawsuits to piggyback federal discrimination claims, as civil-rights lawyers use the new federal discipline data in their legal strategies against the supposedly racist US school system.

Even if no one has complained about discrimination, even if there is no other evidence of racism, the numbers themselves will “prove” that things are unfair.

Such databases have never before existed. Obama is presiding over the largest consolidation of personal data in US history. He is creating a diversity police state where government race cops and civil-rights lawyers will micromanage demographic outcomes in virtually every aspect of society.

The first black president, quite brilliantly, has built a quasi-reparations infrastructure perpetually fed by racial data that will outlast his administration.

Paul Sperry is a Hoover Institution media fellow and author of “The Great American Bank Robbery,” which exposes the racial politics behind the mortgage bust
.

Marin County Community Development Department admits "buffer inventory" is a Fraud.

Marin County Community Development Department admits that the so called "buffer inventory" becomes part of the "essential inventory" of subsidized housing for the California mandated Regional Needs Housing Assessment. Citizens complained when planners insisted in adding additional 400 units of inventory over the California State mandates during the 2014 Housing Element. The planning department claimed it was just insurance should the state not accept some of the sites. Now, once the RHNA has been approved, the Community Planning Department has a new tune. Buffer inventory must be replaced.

Such deceptions by the County Planning Department are common and is one of the reasons Citizens all over Marin County are rising up against this bureaucratic tyranny.

The 2014 Housing element should be amended to reflect only the state mandated requirements.


 We will Save Marin Again!

An interview with Stanley Kurtz about the "Affirmative Further Fair Housing Rule."

Metallica rock star plans 34-unit Lucas Valley subdivision from February 17, 2011

Metallica rock star plans 34-unit Lucas Valley subdivision

By

By Nels Johnson, Marin Independent Journal

POSTED: 02/17/11, 12:01 AM PST | UPDATED: ON 02/17/2011

0 COMMENTS

Metallica rock star James Hetfield, who two years ago stirred controversy by erecting a fence blocking a popular trail that cut across his 600-acre Rocking H 2 Ranch, wants to subdivide the lower part of his Lucas Valley property to provide 34 home sites.

Hetfield, who has dedicated 330 acres of the ranch at higher elevations to the Marin County Open Space District, seeks to cluster 27 homes on acre lots on the lower portion as allowed by zoning — while remaining eligible for seven more residences governed by low- and moderate-income housing regulations.
[ Supervisors have placed an "affordable housing overlay district" on his property making it available for high density affordable housing at 30 units per acre.  The site sits across the road from Grady Ranch]

READ MORE HERE

Governor Brown wants to Reduce Gas consumption by 50%

Gov. Brown Talks To KCAL9 About Bill That Would Mandate Reduction In Gas Usage

July 16, 2015 10:26 PM

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 Fuel Prices, Gasoline, Jerry Brown

Dave Bryan

Dave Bryan joined the KCAL9 news team in March, 1994, after ha...

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Election Returns

LOS ANGELES (CBSLA.com) — As Gov. Jerry Brown prepares to travel to Rome next week for an international climate conference, the debate over a bill aimed at reducing gas usage in California is heating up.

Brown fully supports SB-350, which would mandate a 50-percent cutback in California’s gas usage in the next 15 years, arguing that it’s a prime factor in global warming.

“We’ve got a serious problem here,” he told KCAL9 Political Reporter Dave Bryan via satellite. “Burning oil and gas and coal and diesel is a big part of the problem. We’ve got to find new bio-fuels. We have to be more efficient. We’ve got a lot to do. And by the way, if we do nothing, the cost is unimaginable.”

“We think this is reckless legislation and one that people certainly need to be aware of because it’ll impact every single motorist in the state of California,” Tupper Hull of the Western States Petroleum Association said via Skype.

Critics charge the bill provides no specific plan to achieve the massive cutback in gas usage. That would be left up to the California Air Resources Board, which those critics, like the oil industry say, would have no limits on what it could mandate.

The impact on Californians, they argue, could be devastating.

“What are they supposed to do to get to work? To get their kids to school?” asked Hull. “What is supposed to replace all of this gasoline and diesel that’s gonna be taken out of the system?”

“Well, of course, the people who are gonna sell 50 percent less petroleum are not only gonna have questions, they’re gonna have a fierce, unrelenting opposition. So, let’s be clear about that,” said Brown.

Cutting gas consumption in half, though, may be especially difficult in the Los Angeles area, where sitting in traffic jams is a long hated ritual and the rapid transit system is still decades away from being a truly comprehensive regional people mover, like New York or Chicago have.

While the oil industry have been leading the charge and criticizing the bill, Assemblyman Roger Hernandez, a Democrat from West Covina, was quoted in The Los Angeles Times as questioning whether an appointed board should be making the rules for cutting gas consumption, charging the bill would give them a blank check of unregulated and unlimited power over the lives of Californians.

In an interview, Brown asked in response: who do you want regulating the consumption? The oil companies?

“You saw what they did and what? Did gasoline go up 80 cents in the last week? Who’s regulating that? Well, the companies were. So, you can have a company regulate or you can have an agency of government,” Brown said, adding: “You need an authority within government to set the conditions of survivability.”

The bill appears to be well on its way to passage having already cleared the state Senate and some Assembly committees, but the debate over how to cut in half California’s dependency on gas by 2030 is possib

Look Out Marin! Single Family Neighborhoods are under Attack.

A developer and housing task-force member sells the ‘upzoning’ of Seattle

That housing committee really did call to upzone all single-family zoning in Seattle. One of the architects of the plan explains and defends it.

When Mayor Ed Murray announced Monday that he was endorsing all the proposals of his housing affordability committee, he took great pains to say it wouldn’t cause much change in Seattle’s single-family-zoned neighborhoods after all.

For special emphasis, he said this twice.

“I’m going to say this again, because there’s been a little fun out there about us plowing under every single-family neighborhood,” Murray said. “Under our plan, 94 percent of existing single-family neighborhoods will see no upzones.”

That’s a strong statement, but is it true? The reliability of a talking point is usually inversely related to the number of times a politician repeats it. So I decided to just ask a member of the Housing Affordabily and Livability committee to walk me through the facts.

The first thing architect David Neiman said when I got him on the phone wasn’t exactly aligned with the mayor’s spin.


“I think the mayor was trying to do some messaging there,” Neiman said. “The rules definitely would change in all the single-family zones in Seattle.”

If approved, the new rules would cover the entire city and would, Neiman said, be an upzone to all single-family lots in Seattle.

Neiman is a developer who strongly backs the housing committee’s final report. He also lives in my neighborhood, Madrona, which like many of the lower-density parts of Seattle has houses on 5,000-square-foot lots centered on a commercial district with some apartment buildings.

He said a way to visualize the proposal for Seattle’s single-family zones is this: It effectively triples the density of development allowed today, while retaining the same housing bulk and lot coverage limitations.

“So you could take a lot where you are currently able to build one home, and you could slice it into three units,” Neiman says. “That could be three free-standing small homes, or one building divided into three flats, or three row houses, or three condos.”

You wouldn’t have to build any of these things. But the economics of the change likely would spur redevelopment across many single-family zoned parts of the city.

Neiman sketched out the upzone this way: Imagine a small $400,000 Seattle bungalow in, say, West Seattle. Under current boomtown conditions, that house is a candidate to be torn down and replaced by a new home, priced at $1 million plus.

With the changes, a developer could raze the bungalow and instead build three smaller homes or condos in a triplex building, with a goal of selling each for, say, $600,000, Neiman said. Suddenly the $1 million plus project is a $1.8 million project, with roughly similar construction costs.

“When you can put three units there instead of one, it’s got a lot more juice to it,” Neiman said.

This juicing would likely cause widespread redevelopment of lower-priced single family home stock over time. The wealthier single family areas would be more likely to remain unchanged.

“You’re probably not going to see a string of triplexes going up in Broadmoor,” he said.

People could hold onto their bungalows as long as they please, or even build new ones. But many of Seattle’s smaller and older houses would make way for higher-density development.

That’s the whole point of that part of the housing plan, Neiman said — to spur development in single-family zones. The goal is to densify without trampling the leafy neighborhood feel. But, “it’s enough of an upzone that the committee talked about trying to get something back for it,” such as a payment into an affordable-housing fund whenever a property is redeveloped at the higher zoning, Neiman said.
Messaging all this, or whatever we’re calling what the mayor did, seems to me to be a poor way to start a citywide conversation on some of the biggest zoning changes proposed in Seattle in our lifetimes.

So thanks go to Neiman for laying it all out there, unvarnished. I’m already on record that I think it’s an overreaction to upzone the entire city, especially until we get better infrastructure to handle the growth. Plus: save the bungalows!

But Neiman earned the last word. I asked him: Why is this a good idea?

“You and I couldn’t afford to live in our own neighborhood if we moved to Seattle now,” he said. “Right? So without some redeveloping, we’re simply closing the door behind us.


“This does mean we’re going to lose some of the old Seattle fabric, some of the bungalows. But we’ll create a new fabric. This city has to change or else we’re going to be a city only for the very rich and the very poor.

“I came to the conclusion that sitting there with your arms folded is not a reasonable response anymore.”

Crony Builders to Sacramento. Give us Government Funding, We'll fix Housing or else!

Break the logjam on affordable housing

By Michael Strech

California’s building industry is in the business of creating opportunity. So with headlines from San Diego to Sacramento screaming that housing prices are out of reach for most families, we can’t wait to get to work to build more safe and affordable places to live.

The production of 1.5 million homes needed to meet demand is a massive undertaking, and will require collaboration between private industry, and federal, state and local governments. Across the state, shovel-ready projects are poised to break ground, but construction has ground to a halt on thousands of affordable homes because state financing has dried up. [From the Taxpayers!]


A package of bills spearheaded by Assembly Speaker Toni Atkins seeks to stitch all the components together. Assembly Bill 35 would expand the state’s annual Low Income Housing Tax Credit by $300 million, drawing twice that amount of new federal investment. AB 1335 would generate as much as $500 million in state funding, which would, in turn, leverage another $2.8 billion in federal money. The $500 million dedicated fund would come from a $75 recording fee on certain real estate documents, excluding home and commercial property sales.

According to a March report by the Legislative Analyst’s Office, the high cost of homes forces people to spend much more of their income on housing, puts homeownership out of reach for many and forces people to live in crowded housing and commute further to their jobs – all of which makes California a less desirable place to live. That in turn makes it more difficult for companies to hire and retain qualified employees, which ultimately drags down California’s economic potential. 

[Few people "aspire" to live in government subsidized apartments.  The writer assumes all homes are equal and only proximity to work is important.  This is definitely not true. How many Silicon Valley engineers want their family in cramped apartments by a freeway?]

Increasing the state’s investment in affordable housing will also create jobs, an estimated 29,000 for every $500 million. Our economy could see an immediate boost as soon as these developments get underway. Business organizations across the state – including the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, Orange County Business Council and Los Angeles Business Council – have all called for increased state investment in affordable homes.

The bills would revive the market for affordable homes that has essentially dried up since the elimination of redevelopment agencies, which were crucial to local government’s ability to support affordable construction.

California’s sophisticated public-private model provides stable, affordable places to live and creates well-paying jobs, but without state investment, this successful model won’t work.

Just as we have decided that tax deductions for mortgages and federal backing of home loans expands economic opportunity, so does state investment in affordable housing. If we make the right choices, our economy will be a huge winner.

[Affordable housing is a development scheme to shift development and taxes onto local municipalities and taxpayers.  These communities are straining under massive taxation already.  Just say "NO" to laws to fatten crony developers]

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/opinion/op-ed/soapbox/article19902279.html#storylink=cpy

Marin County Supervisors Will Soon Reveal Their Regard For Marin's Traditional Character: Please attend next Tuesday, July 21st meeting

Marin County Supervisors Will Soon Reveal Their Regard For Marin's Traditional Character:
Please attend the July 21st Board of Supervisor Hearing re: amending the Affordable Housing Combining District and send in letters!

The 1,200-acre Silveira-St. Vincent’s tract in northern San Rafael is among several areas designated for potential high-density affordable housing. (IJ file photo) 

Dear Neighbors and Friends,

Last month, the Marin County Planning Commission rejected a proposed County Development Code amendment designed by the Supervisors to lower the density of sites designated with the “Affordable Housing Combining District” (AH District) zone from 30 units per acre to 20 units per acre, as allowed by a new state law (AB 1537) embraced by the Supervisors. On July 21st the Supervisors will take up where the Commission left off and decide the fate of the proposal.

The AH District currently applies to portions of three sites in Unincorporated Marin: two sites identified in the 2015 to 2023 Marin County Housing Element, the St. Vincent’s / Silveira site and the Drake Ave. site in Marin City, and, in addition, the Golden Gate Seminary site in Strawberry.

Remember Assembly Bill 1537 that Mark Levine and the Supervisors fought so hard for? The bill lowered the default density for housing sites identified for lower income households in Marin County's Housing Element from the "Metropolitan" density of 30 units per acre to the "Suburban" density of 20 units per acre. If the Supervisors agree with the Planning Commission’s decision, then any benefit from AB 1537 would be killed. By not lowering the density at the housing element sites identified in the 2015 to 2023 Housing Element, the sites remain zoned for the Metropolitan density of 30 units per acre.

Yet, the current proposal to lower the density at the sites would NOT lower the number of units allowed to be built at the sites. "What?" The draft amendment proposes to lower the density to 20 units per acre and at the same time INCREASE the number of acres where the units could be built, thus keeping the potential number of units that could be built at the sites, the same number.

This makes us scratch our heads and wonder... Do the Supervisors truly want to lower potential density of affordable housing to 20 units per acre to keep Marin's traditional character and lower potential adverse environmental impacts from high-density housing?

Moreover, as originally written, the AH District was designed to only apply to sites identified in a Housing Element. The Golden Gate Seminary site was removed from the 2015 to 2023 Marin County Housing Element and therefore, the AH District should no longer apply to the site. Yet, the County is now changing the rules to extend the reach of the high-density AH District and apply the designation to the Seminary site too.  Is a site near you next?

If the County and the Supervisors truly want to maintain Marin’s traditional character and lower potential adverse environmental impacts from high-density housing, then, at minimum, they should lower the density of the AH District from 30 units to 20 units per acre and NOT increase the area of the sites where the AH District is applied.  Moreover, by lowering the density at Housing Element sites, Marin County would be able to show the California State Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD) that the County can provide affordable housing at lower densities.  Such a history would help Marin County officials renew Assembly Bill 1537 when it expires.  They should then make similar changes to all the other County zoning that allows for 30 units per acre.

It is questionable whether or not 20 units per acre is low enough to qualify for the traditional semi rural character of most of Marin County. All concerned should remember that if the State Density Bonus were applied to a site, then the applicable residential density would be increased by up to 35%. As such, the Density Bonus could increase 30 units per acre to 40 units per acre (equal to the density of the Tamal Vista Apartments at the WinCup site in Corte Madera) and increase 20 units per acre to 27 units per acre.

We will soon learn the Supervisors' thoughts regarding this matter.

The Marin County Board of Supervisors will hold a public hearing regarding the Development Code Amendment for the Affordable Housing Combining District on Tuesday, July 21st at 1:30 pm at the Civic Center. Please send comments beforehand to the Board of Supervisors -bos@marincounty.org
ksears@marincounty.org

Please read the attached letter from Sustainable TamAlmonte to the Supervisors regarding this issue.  If you don't have time to write your own letter and you agree with ours, then please send in a quick note endorsing our letter.

Thank you in advance for taking action.  Together we can make a difference!

Cheers,
Sharon

Massive Government Overreach: Obama’s AFFH Rule Is Out Under new management?

Massive Government Overreach: Obama’s AFFH Rule Is Out Under new management?

by STANLEY KURTZ July 8, 2015 10:47 AM Today, HUD Secretary Julian Castro announced the finalization of the Obama administration’s Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Rule. A front-page article preemptively defending the move appears in today’s Washington Post. The final rule is 377 pages, vastly longer than the preliminary version of the rule promulgated in 2013. 

AFFH is easily one of President Obama’s most radical initiatives, on a par with Obamacare in its transformative potential. In effect, AFFH gives the federal government a lever to re-engineer nearly every American neighborhood — imposing a preferred racial and ethnic composition, densifying housing, transportation, and business development in suburb and city alike, and weakening or casting aside the authority of local governments over core responsibilities, from zoning to transportation to education. Not only the policy but the political implications are immense — at the presidential, congressional, state, and local levels. 

It is a scandal that the mainstream press has largely refused to report on AFFH until the day of its final release. The rule has been out in preliminary form for two years, and well before that the Obama administration’s transformative aims in urban/suburban policy were evident. 

Three years ago, when I wrote about Obama’s policy blueprint in Spreading the Wealth: How Obama Is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities, the administration’s efforts to keep this issue under the radar were evident. Only last month, an admission of the stealth relied on by advocates to advance this initiative was caught on video. 

Obama has downplayed his policy goals in this area and delayed the finalization of AFFH for years, because he understands how politically explosive this rule is. Once the true implications of AFFH are understood, Americans will rebel. The only prospect for successful imposition is a frog-boiling strategy of gradual intensification. The last day the frog will be able to jump is Tuesday, November 8, 2016. 

Fundamentally, AFFH is an attempt to achieve economic integration. Race and ethnicity are being used as proxies for class, since these are the only hooks for social engineering provided by the Fair Housing Act of 1968. Like AFFH itself, today’s Washington Post piece blurs the distinction between race and class, conflating the persistence of “concentrated poverty” with housing discrimination by race. Not being able to afford a freestanding house in a bedroom suburb is no proof of racial discrimination. Erstwhile urbanites have been moving to rustic and spacious suburbs since Cicero built his villa outside Rome. Even in a monoracial and mono-ethnic world, suburbanites would zone to set limits on dense development. 

Emily Badger’s piece in today’s Washington Post focuses on race, but the real story of AFFH is the attempt to force integration by class, to densify development in American suburbs and cities, and to undo America’s system of local government and replace it with a “regional” alternative that turns suburbs into helpless satellites of large cities. Once HUD gets its hooks into a municipality, no policy area is safe. Zoning, transportation, education, all of it risks slipping into the control of the federal government and the new, unelected regional bodies the feds will empower. Over time, AFFH could spell the end of the local democracy that Alexis de Tocqueville rightly saw as the foundation of America’s liberty and distinctiveness. 

At this point, municipalities across the country need to seriously consider refraining from applying for Community Development Block Grants and other grant programs sponsored by HUD. Take one dollar of HUD money and you will be forced to submit to its demands, which can reach far beyond housing. Unfortunately, this is a highly imperfect solution, and not only because municipalities would be surrendering money taxed from their citizens’ pockets. The recent Supreme Court decision in Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. Inclusive Communities Project has provided the federal government with a second club to use against municipalities seeking to escape HUD control. (See my piece on Inclusive Communities in the latest issue of National Review.) Ultimately, only a Republican president acting in concert with a Republican Congress can stymie AFFH and undo the damage of the Supreme Court’s recent housing decision. 

This brings us to politics. As noted, AFFH is a largely unacknowledged attempt to force economic integration on every neighborhood in America. Yet in a recent Rasmussen poll, 83 percent of respondents said it was not the government’s job to diversify neighborhoods by income level, while only 8 percent say that this is an appropriate task for government. Now you know why the Obama administration and a compliant press corps have kept this initiative quiet. 

It will take time to collect the data on which HUD’s new demands for local governments all over America will be based. While important enforcement will begin under the Obama administration, the major impact of AFFH will come under President Hillary Clinton, should she be elected. And Obama’s AFFH enforcer, Julian Castro, is widely touted as a likely vice-presidential running mate for Hillary. That means AFFH is going to be an issue in the next presidential campaign. 

And the political implications go deeper still, to every level of government. Westchester County, New York, where AFFH has had a dry run of sorts, is now administered by Republican county executive Robert Astorino. Many forget that before the Obama administration tried to force Westchester County to cast aside its own zoning laws and build high-density, low-income housing at its own expense, Westchester was a liberal Democratic county run by liberal Democrats. After all, this is where Bill and Hillary Clinton live. At the local level, the Obama administration drove Westchester into the arms of the Republicans. The same thing could happen nationally, at every political level. But only if the frog wakes up and jumps by November of 2016. Even with AFFH now public, the Obama administration and the press corps will do everything in their power to obscure the real issues at stake in the massive AFFH power-grab. Don’t let that happen. — Stanley Kurtz is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He can be reached at com

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/420896/massive-government-overreach-obamas-affh-rule-out-stanley-kurtz

1950s Urban Renewal: The Dynamic American City (1956)

Advocates urban redevelopment and renewal, 1950s-style. Supports many planning strategies which are criticized today: the destruction of "blighted" neighborhoods in the name of progress, autocentric planning and construction, and suburban sprawl. .