Biden’s Woke Housing Plan for All of Us

Rising interest rates and a shortage of lower-cost houses under the Biden administration continue to make homeownership unobtainable for many young families. Instead of working to solve actual problems like these, President Joe Biden is once again choosing to prioritize the expansive promotion of woke diversity, equity, and inclusion ideology in housing policies, as a recent proposed rule from the Department of Housing and Urban Development shows.

The proposed regulation would encourage taxpayer-funded housing agencies to abandon the goal of ensuring fairness in the housing market and instead pursue the elimination of all inequality in housing and income. Under the rule , program participants—entities like public housing agencies, grant recipients, private entities that supply public or subsidized housing, and other entities receiving HUD funds—must supply an “Equity Plan” to HUD, describing the steps they have taken to “eliminate disparities in housing-related opportunities.”

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One policy that HUD says will satisfy its equity standards is universal basic income—a disastrous progressive policy that would destroy the American way of life.

Another example of a way for program participants to comply is to campaign to change local zoning laws in the name of “inclusionary zoning,” a capricious and misleading term that encompasses many policies to force below-market-value public housing into communities by removing zoning restrictions on such builds. This would, by HUD’s own admission , lead to “increased prices, reduced quantities [of housing],” and “market inefficiency.”

Although this is simply one option listed among several, it is not clear what interest a federal agency has in meddling in the perfectly legitimate and non-discriminatory affairs of how local communities zone themselves.

In a particularly egregious example, HUD suggests that government-sponsored entities might choose to begin “modifying preferences” of individuals to avoid inequality of outcomes in housing. HUD provides no qualification for what this means, except for a vague gesture at the possibility of “local leadership” “pushing” for progressive housing policies against the wishes of “local political ideology.” It seems that even having individual preferences about where to live or how to zone your own community is unacceptable inequity to the Biden administration.

HUD’s most drastic option calls for program participants to fight inequality of “community assets” and “different access” to community “critical resources.” These “resources” and “assets” can mean anything from schools, parks, and police to access to credit and community wealth.

This opaque language conceals HUD’s aim: to empower activists to pressure middle- and working-class neighborhoods into having their taxpayer-funded resources used up by people who didn’t pay for them. And of course, the only way to eliminate inequality of “assets” and “resources” is to make every neighborhood the same, doing away with the ability of Americans to choose to live in communities with public goods that they choose to fund through popular policies and administered by elected officials.

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