Free Republic

I wrote here and here about the Obama administration’s proposed rule on “affirmatively furthering fair housing” (AFFH), an attempt to dictate how we shall live. In essence, President Obama seeks to use the power of the national government to create communities of a certain kind, each having what the federal government deems an appropriate mix of economic, racial, and ethnic diversity. The proposed AFFH rule, issued last July, was expected to be finalized by the end of last year. But the year ended with no further action. 2014 was supposed to be the year Obama’s “year of action” — the...

In a bad economy, we expect poor people will get poorer. But this recession has taught us that one mishap can snip anyone's strings and collapse middle-class financial security like a marionette. We didn't expect that. Consider planned communities. They're appealing as places where everyone is supposed to keep up: No front lawns going to seed; no cars rusting on top of them. However, the poor economy has meant that some of the neighbors can't keep up – and this hits homeowners associations in a unique way. Neighbors are financially yoked together, and problems for one can mean problems for...

Martha Stewart was not an accident of history. She came along in the late 20th century as a kind of spirit guide to a society whose bad choices and misinvestments had led to the wholesale destruction of any place in America that people called home. And by this I mean the towns, neighborhoods, and city districts of our land, not just the individual dwellings. By the 1980s, America had been converted, with monstrous efficiency, into what I have called a geography of nowhere, a panorama of identical highway strips, malls, big box warehouses, fried food out-parcels, and free parking wastelands...