The moment of truth has arrived because this week the Republican congressional leadership will decide how hard to push to include Rep. Paul Gosar’s amendment defunding AFFH in the Transportation Housing and Urban Development appropriations bill. The House passed the Gosar amendment this spring. However, it is far from clear that the Gosar defund language will be retained. That depends on how committed Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan are to its retention.

Ken Blackwell (the former mayor of Cincinnati) and Rick Manning make the case for insisting on the Gosar amendment here. They argue that the amendment is necessary to protect the most fundamental function of local governments – to control over where and what is built in their community.

Stanley Kurtz frames the issue this way:

Who controls the zoning in your town — your local elected government or Barack Obama? Who controls decisions in your neighborhood about where schools, shopping malls, and apartment buildings are located — your local elected government or Barack Obama? Who controls whether you live in a densely packed neighborhood with real barriers to travel by automobiles, or a car-friendly bedroom suburb — you or Barack Obama? That’s what Congress is about to decide.

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.

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/42 ... nley-kurtz

Like more than a thousand other jurisdictions, Westchester County in New York has been a recipient of Community Development Block Grant and other federal housing funds. A condition to be eligible for federal housing grants is the promise to affirmatively further fair housing (AFFH); that is, to identify, analyze, and take the steps necessary to overcome the barriers to fair housing choice. When a jurisdiction seeks payment under its grant, it is making an implied representation that it has affirmatively furthered fair housing.