What can Trump do to stop inequality?

Joel Kotkin writes at Daily Beast,

...Racial and class inequality is very much alive even in the most “progressive” cities. In New York, the poster child for urban revitalization, poverty and homelessness have worsened, in large part due to soaring housing costs. Since 2007, median rents in the city have gone up 8.5 percent while median renters’ incomes have gone down by 6.8 percent. Particularly shocking have been rent rises at the edge of gentrification, in places like Brooklyn’s Williamsburg—where rents have risen 80 percent since the 1990s.

...Overall, the outer suburbs and exurbs, home to more than 40 percent of the metropolitan population, have added population at more than five times the rate of urban cores.

...Bottom line: The suburbs and exurbs disdained by most urbanists and Democratic politicians continue to add residents and jobs as inner cities continue to languish.

In fact, roughly 80 percent of all job growth since 2010 has been in suburbs and exurbs. And tech, supposedly newly focused on the urban core, still concentrates largely in dispersed, suburban environments from Silicon Valley to Austin to Raleigh.

Increasingly, at least in the centers of the greatest hipster infestation, minorities and working class families are being driven into less desirable areas, often further from work locations. This helps create new social tensions and, in many places, notably Chicago, more social unrest, and now the most murders in more than two decades. Overall, the rate of violent crime in urban cores remains almost four times higher than the national average, according to FBI data. The worst violence, and the sharpest upticks over the decade have been in cities with large black populations, including Detroit, Oakland, St. Louis, Memphis, Cleveland, and Atlanta.

Left out of the urban revival, minority and poor communities face diminishing opportunities while others prosper. This is true not only in places like Chicago, notes researcher Daniel Hertz, but also in New York where class and race inequality are much higher than in the rest of the country. Generally speaking, it’s the bluest and largest cities that suffer the worst levels of inequality.

Indeed despite the media spin, in the core cities of the 51 metropolitan areas, 81 percent of the population increase over the past decade was under the poverty line, compared to 32 percent of the suburban population increase. Despite talk about “suburban ghettos,” the poverty rate in the suburbs remains roughly half that of urban centers (20.9 percent in core compared to 11.4 percent in the suburbs as of 2010). Crime rates in core cities, meanwhile, remain over three times higher than in the suburbs.

No surprise that discrete and genteel “ethnic cleansing”—in the form of HUD “affirmative action” or taxpayer funded redevelopment—appeals to many urban boosters. In contrast, the much sought after hipster and wealthy childless adults thrill developers and mayors; they love a population that will pay a premium to live there and that doesn’t need good schools or working-class jobs.

...Certainly, the new HUD should abandon its agenda of redirecting populations, or forcing high density on reluctant communities, whether in the poorer urban neighborhoods or the more comfortable suburbs. But there needs to more. One hopeful sign—particularly for cities in the heartland—would be attempts to keep industrial jobs in what’s left of the manufacturing economy, the loss of which has devastated cities such as Milwaukee. Similarly Trump’s stand against H-1B visas could help keep some white-collar positions in the hands of citizens residing in our cities, including on the coasts.

Other steps could be taken to reawaken the grassroots economy, particularly in hard-hit poorer neighborhoods. This might include such things deregulating some businesses, like in cosmetology, and making it easier for new restaurants and shops. Yet these things cannot be mandated from Washington; it will take some rise in the level of business savvy of our elected leaders in cities. Perhaps most critical will be addressing the escalating crime rate in many cities, where by far the vast majority of victims are minorities, as Trump himself pointed out.

Other parts of the potential Trumpian urban agenda, such as charter schools and vouchers, long supported by his Education Department nominee Kathy DeVos, could help address poor urban education, arguably the biggest reason why families don’t stay in cities like Chicago with their dysfunctional schools. Federal support for educational reform is vastly preferable to the kind of anti-charter agenda that, for example, Hillary Clinton, with her incestuous ties to the teacher unions, would have promoted.

Similarly, a shift away from “one size fits all” transportation policies might allow communities to build public transit options, ranging from bus rapid transit to innovative dial-a-ride services. Under the old regime, money tended to go into light rail and trolley projects designed to appeal to upscale riders and developers; a better focus on inner city needs might be actually helping working class people actually get to work as quickly and easily as possible, at reasonable cost rather than building dedicated lines that tend to push land prices up, and existing residents out.
Even if Carson can concoct such an agenda, this is unlikely to make Donald Trump popular among the retro-urbanist chattering class who have thrived under the current urban regime. But it is to be hoped that such a new approach, at very least, could finally make progressives, who control America’s big cities as virtual fiefs, reconsider policies that have led to tragic levels of impoverishment, violence, and inequality across our great urban centers.

Read more here.

"HUD combines socialist goals and fascist methods that seriously distort and undermine markets."

At Chicago Boyz Kevin Villani takes a look at HUD.

HUD combines socialist goals and fascist methods that seriously distort and undermine markets. There is neither market nor political discipline on the enormous scope of its activities. HUD met unfunded goals through financial coercion, undermining both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and their commercial banking competitors, with the collusion of the Senate Committee responsible for both financial and housing oversight, leading to the sub-prime lending debacle of 2008.

There is no economic rationale for a federal role in housing or urban affairs in a market economy. HUD represents a continuing systemic threat for which there is no cure. May it RIP.

Read much more here.

Will Dr. Carson do the surgery that is needed?

Francis Menton writes at Manhattan Contrarian about the fuss the Left is making about Ben Carson as the nominee to head HUD.

...the people who recently thought it was no problem at all to have someone with a background as "community organizer" and two years in the Senate as President now seem to think that experience specific to subsidized housing is critical to running one little department of the government.

you only have to look into it for a few minutes to realize that the business of HUD is creating poverty traps to make the supposed "beneficiaries" into government dependents for life. HUD is not merely a failure as an anti-poverty program; it is a disaster. It operates substantially on the model of socialism ("to each according to his needs"; assets in public ownership), and it achieves results that would make Cuba or Venezuela or East Germany proud. Readers here know that HUD's flagship, the New York City Housing Authority, is an unspeakable disaster at every level. Its properties, housing about 7% of New York City's population, sit on vast acreage of prime real estate -- some of it (e.g., miles of Manhattan waterfront) among the most valuable in the world -- and its residents receive subsidies in many cases worth $50,000 and $100,000 per family per year, and yet the poverty rate in its projects exceeds 50%, turnover is almost non-existent as residents remain in poverty for life, the rents cover barely a third of operating costs and nothing for capital projects or property taxes, and HUD throws some $2 billion down the rathole every year only to maintain the poverty and dependency.

And then there's HUD's latest big initiative, the program known as "Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing," by which the Obama HUD has sought to force middle-class and wealthy communities around the country to build more subsidized public housing. Supposedly the theory is that the thing holding back the poor from entering the middle class is isolation in poor inner cities, and once such people are placed in wealthier areas they will begin to rise up. That's right: the geniuses at HUD seem not to have noticed that the 120,000 or so of the residents of certain existing projects, otherwise known as the NYCHA residents in Manhattan, despite living in the midst of the wealthiest county in the country, and many of them directly next door or across the street from the very most expensive condos in the country, nevertheless remain mired in poverty for life. The glaring disproof of the whole theory behind AFFH is right in front of their eyes, and yet they refuse to look and they march forward pushing more of their disaster by force and coercion.

Well, that's what "expertise" and "experience" in the field of publicly-subsidized housing will get you. It gets you a bureaucracy firmly committed to the socialist model, to be run by themselves of course, in which they can earn cushy life-time salaries while they keep their inferiors trapped in poverty for life. It gets you a bureaucracy with absolutely no concern or interest whatsoever in ending dependency and getting people out of poverty, but an overriding concern for one thing and one thing only, which is growing their own budgets and staffs and empires year over year. Are you surprised that the only head of agency they would find acceptable is one of their own -- i.e., someone with the right "experience"?

...Where is Carson on any of this? He hasn't had a whole lot to say specifically on the subject of subsidized housing, but here is a relevant statement from a 2015 speech:

Dr. Ben Carson kicked off the Conservative Political Action Conference, telling an attentive audience that the next President must "get rid of dependency" that some Americans might have on the U.S. government. "We need to understand what true compassion is to reach out to individuals who think that being dependent is reasonable as long as they feel safe," said Carson, the first speaker to address this year's annual keynote conservative conference. "It's not compassion to pat them on the head and say, 'There, there, I'm going to take care of all your needs, your health care, your food.' That's the opposite of compassion."

You can see why The Blob would hate and fear this guy. Sounds like a good appointment to me.

At the Manhattan Institute's City Journal Online, Howard Husock calls Carson "just the man for that job," and lays out a program for Carson to implement on taking office. The program includes things like time limits for living in public housing, bringing private management to projects, and ending the ridiculous AFFH. Fair enough, as far as it goes. But even Husock stops short of calling for radical surgery. How about just giving away the projects to the residents and getting out of the business?

Read more here.

Ben Carson to be nominated as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development

Trump has announced that he is appointing Ben Carson as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. A brilliant neurosurgeon, Carson was appointed head of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopins Children's Center at age 33! In that position he

garnered national acclaim for directing the first surgery to separate twins connected at the back of the head.

I think he can handle the HUD job, don't you? Well, if you are a doubter, you will enjoy the "reporting" by AP and CNN.

Another massive new Obama power grab

Stanley Kurtz writes in National Review that in July

HUD Secretary Julian Castro announced the finalization of the Obama administration’s Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Rule.

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.

...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.

...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.

Read more here.

Regionalism

Stanley Kurtz asserts in National Review that while we were distracted by the Iran deal, there has been

an extraordinary takeover of America’s cities and towns by the federal government.

...It’s difficult to say what’s more striking about President Obama’s Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) regulation: its breathtaking radicalism, the refusal of the press to cover it, or its potential political ramifications.

The plan has three elements: 1) Inhibit suburban growth, and when possible encourage suburban re-migration to cities. This can be achieved, for example, through regional growth boundaries (as in Portland), or by relative neglect of highway-building and repair in favor of public transportation. 2) Force the urban poor into the suburbs through the imposition of low-income housing quotas. 3) Institute “regional tax-base sharing,” where a state forces upper-middle-class suburbs to transfer tax revenue to nearby cities and less-well-off inner-ring suburbs (as in Minneapolis/St. Paul). If you press suburbanites into cities, transfer urbanites to the suburbs, and redistribute suburban tax money to cities, you have effectively abolished the suburbs. For all practical purposes, the suburbs would then be co-opted into a single metropolitan region. Advocates of these policy prescriptions call themselves “regionalists.”

Read more here.