Donald Trump says Joe Biden Wants to Abolish the Suburbs. Apparently, They Both do.
So why are they arguing?
As we creep closer to the November 3rd U.S. presidential election, candidates are attempting to define themselves and their opponents. Recently, Donald Trump and his supporters are attempting to differentiate themselves from Joe Biden on a peculiar issue: single-family zoning and the suburbs.
It started in July when Trump said, “They [the Democrats] want to indoctrinate our children, defund our police, abolish the suburbs, incite riots and leave every city at the mercy of the radical left.”
Made famous for toting guns in front of their mansion during an anti-racism protest in St. Louis, Mark and Patty McCloskey claimed that the Democrats “want to abolish the suburbs altogether by ending single-family home zoning,” at the Republican National Convention.
Suburbs tend to mostly be zoned for single-family homes, and so tying these two things together in contrast with more urban YIMBY goals is the next logical step.
Trump is trying to distinguish himself from Joe Biden by evoking images of the suburban household that was the dream of the 1970s and 1980s. While much has changed since then, as of the 2010 census U.S. suburbs were 81% white. With pictures of demonstrations and riots in urban centers, he is attempting to pull messaging from Richard Nixon’s law and order playbook.
I won’t focus on the racial undertones of this — there are many, and I am sure there are many writers pointing this out. Instead, I want to focus on what Biden and Trump have said about housing and the issue of single-family zoning, and whether it matters at all.
Biden on Zoning
The Biden Harris Housing Plan mostly focusses on the ending housing discrimination, and views changes to zoning rules through this lens
In regards to zoning, their plan claims “Exclusionary zoning has for decades been strategically used to keep people of color and low-income families out of certain communities.” Their proposal is to require states to develop inclusionary zoning strategies in order to receive Community Development Lock Grant or Surface Transporation Block Grants.
Additionally, they propose establishing a $100 billion Affordable Housing Fund with $65 billion going to “incentives for state housing authorities and the Indian Housing Block Grant program to construct or rehabilitate low-cost, efficient, resilient, and accessible housing in areas where affordable housing is in short supply.” Such funds would be directed to communities with an “affordability crisis” to “implement new zoning laws that encourage more affordable housing.”
Biden regularly likes to refer back to his time a Vice President during the Obama administration, and in 2015, they did introduce regulations to strengthen the Fair Housing Act of 1968. Previously, the law said any group receiving funds from the Department of Housing and Urban Development would actively have to undo racial segregation, but how was not clearly defined. These rules provided HUD funding recipients with data and tools, and better outlined what desegregation would look like.
Trump on Zoning
Trump has the tendency to contradict himself quite often, and his actions on housing are no exception.
On June 25, 2019, the President signed an executive order on “Establishing a White House Council on Eliminating Regulatory Barriers to Affordable Housing.” In the order, he said, “Driving the rise in housing costs is a lack of housing supply to meet demand.” The lack of housing supply was blamed on “regulatory barriers” that “hinder the development of housing” such as “overly restrictive zoning and growth management controls”. At the head of the council was Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Ben Carson.
Ben Carson’s views on zoning and housing are confusing on their face. On the one hand, he referred to Obama-era rules on desegregation as “social engineering” and proceeded to roll back these rules in 2018. However, such rules were viewed by Carson as an impediment to creating new housing supply.
Instead, Carson sees the issue as related to NIMBYism, and sought to target restrictive zoning codes which he sees as barriers to multi-family housing. Rules introduced by the Trump administration would tie HUD grants to less restrictive zoning. Carson describing these changes said, “I want to encourage the development of mixed-income multifamily dwellings all over the place.”
Trump’s flip to defending single-family homes in rich suburbs is surprising but within character. Faced with challenging electoral prospects, and people’s sense of safety feeling challenged with police brutality and the subsequent demonstrations, he’s going back to the law and order playbook. If he were to have a second term it would be interesting to see if his rhetoric of defending the suburbs was purely electoral bluster, or if he reverses many of the efforts his administration made to end restrictive zoning.
Does This Even Matter?
The elevation of housing and the factors that lead to its unaffordability to the national consciousness is long overdue, but the voices speaking about these issues are often not the ones who can affect policy at the ground level. While practices like suburbs only allowing for single-family homes and communities blocking affordable housing projects which disproportionately help minority families who have not been able to build housing wealth are countrywide problems, the solutions are often at a local level.
The federal government in most situations can only throw money at the issue. If a rich community does not need outside financial help to build infrastructure, they don’t need to worry about HUD withholding funding based on their lacking desegregation efforts or zoning practices. Additionally, addressing this at higher levels has been notoriously hard. California’s Senate Bill 50, which sought to create greater housing supply across the state was defeated in January after two years of debate.
Ultimately, efforts need to be made at the local level to ensure those left out by exclusionary and single-family zoning are heard, and that the only voices in the room are not just NIMBYs. It is hard work, but cities like Minneapolis show that it can be done.
The quiet suburb is now becoming a big deal during this presidential race. Looking in the rearview mirror we know that last time this became an issue during the Nixon presidential campaign there were racial undertones, and it seems like this time it’s the same.
While greater awareness of the racialized context of past zoning practices and their usage in political messaging is important, I also think there are potential risks with where this discussion is going. Sadly, issues like this are beginning to be tied into larger partisan labels. If this falls along hyper-partisan lines and is framed as a fight between urban Democrats and suburban Republicans it may be hard to reach a solution. Rather than talking about communities for all, are we entrenching old views of the suburban-urban divide?
