Free Republic

The Democrat-Media Complex have just told us what they fear the most as an issue in the 2016 election: President Obama’s plan to “fundamentally transform” suburbia (as explained today by Jeannie DeAngelis). This is an issue that literally hits voters where they live, by using the denial of federal funding to override local control and force communities to provide low-income housing distributed to approved minority groups. Investor’s Business Daily reports that all three broadcast networks ignored the story that affects their viewers more directly than almost any other issue. The Big Three news networks all punted on covering one of...

Author Stanley Kurtz argued in his book Spreading The Wealth: How Obama Is Robbing The Suburbs To Pay For the Cites that Barack Obama’s grand socialist plan included redistributing wealth from American suburbs to the inner city. Obama passed regulations in 2013 to force suburban neighborhoods with no record of housing discrimination to build more public housing targeted to ethnic and racial minorities. According to Kurtz, the underlying thrust of the rule change was to force racial and ethnic diversity on the suburbs: The new HUD rule is really about changing the way Americans live. It is part of a...

Politically correct propaganda has invaded our collective conscious with terms that somehow make what was once thought of as abnormal now seem normal. Along with this new jargon comes a new rationale that is irrational to many who persist in living in the real world. Unfortunately, often the realists have remained silent – indifferent to or intimidated by the name-calling of those claiming to be tolerant. And so the topsy-turvy world that once was America has now become a land where free speech is only afforded to those with loud voices who have a national platform and embrace liberal ideologies....

An African-American millionaire can buy a home in any expensive suburb. Color is no longer a barrier. Despite this progress, President Obama's Department of Housing and Urban Development is accusing expensive towns of racism, simply because most minorities can't afford to live there. Westchester County, N.Y., has struggled since 2009 under a plan by a federal monitor to compel the county to comply with HUD's demands for multiunit affordable housing in expensive areas. Hillary Clinton claims to be a warrior against inequality. But her adopted hometown of Chappaqua, an upscale Westchester village that one resident describes as "a little piece...

Covert scheme to cram us all into socialist cities and  'compact' America along Euro lines moving along briskly... Our disingenuous, hyper-left president's myriad hidden agendas are hard to keep track of sometimes, but one that caught my eye a couple years back was betrayed in a 2012 book by Stanley Kurtz: Obama aims to destroy the famed American suburban lifestyle, cram us all into tight city neighborhoods, spike the price of gas/taxes, put us in 30-mi-range electric cars, etc. The idea is to end urban sprawl while mixing cities and suburbs into one tighter, mediocre mix. Like court-ordered bussing destroyed schools...

More people with low incomes now live outside of cities, and some areas are ill-equipped to deal with the influx of the poor. NORCROSS, Ga.—Every weekday around 3:15 p.m., a big, yellow school bus stops on Pelican Drive outside Norcross Extended Stay, near the intersection with Best Friend Drive. Dozens of children file out, carrying their heavy backpacks away from the Wendy’s and the AutoZone, towards the cluster of aging three-story yellow buildings where they live. Some are met by waiting parents, others trek by themselves to the shabby motel rooms, marching past broken-down cars, their tires flat, scattered around...

The proponents of currently fashionable planning doctrines favouring density promulgate a variety of baseless assertions to support their beliefs. These doctrines, which they group under the label of “Smart Growth”, claim, among other things, that from a health and sustainability perspective, the need to increase population densities is imperative. With regard to health these high-density advocates have seized upon the obesity epidemic as a reason to advocate squeezing the population into high-density. This is based on a supposition that living in higher densities promotes greater physical activity and thus lower levels of obesity. They quote studies that show associations between...

RUSH: Ladies and gentlemen, as an adjunct, or a continuation of the discussion just now on the polling data, the Washington Post/ABC News showing how bad it is for the Republicans, the way they're handling the immigration crisis on the Southern border. I had a sound bite yesterday from the governor of Nebraska and I did not get to it, and I could shoot myself for not getting to it. I don't need it now, too late now. It's my bad. But I can tell you what it was about. The governor of Nebraska was livid when he found out...

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...

When Motorola Mobility lined up a Silicon Valley candidate a few months ago for a VP-level role, the phone maker was hopeful he'd accept. After all, the company offered the chance to develop products at a subsidiary of Google Inc. The engineer declined. His reason: the prospect of relocating to Libertyville, Ill., about 35 miles from downtown Chicago, said Scott Sullivan, Motorola's head of human resources.

American politics turn on a now familiar set of categories: red states vs. blue states, rich states vs. poor states, Frostbelt vs. Sunbelt. But these generalizations mask deeper, less visible fissures in our political geography. We have written a great deal about the role of density in metropolitan voting patterns, highlighting the remarkably consistent and robust political red-to-blue tipping point that occurs when a metro reaches a density of roughly 800 residents per square mile. I took a deeper look at our emerging political geography in a recent feature for Politico magazine, where I argued that the suburbs have become...

Poverty is often associated with inner city ghettos, fenced-off projects, or neighborhoods ridden with vice and crime. But the fastest growing poor population actually resides in the land of minivans, picket fences, and big box stores: suburbia. According to a recent Brookings Institution analysis, major metropolitan suburbs became home to the largest and fastest-growing poor population in the country in the 2000s. Poverty levels increased in nearly every congressional district in the nation, hitting Republican and Democratic districts alike. So why is poverty moving beyond major city limits? The authors of that analysis lay out several triggers in a recent...

"Redistributing" the Wealth

America’s urban landscape is changing, but in ways not always predicted or much admired by our media, planners, and pundits. The real trend-setters of the future—judged by both population and job growth—are not in the oft-praised great “legacy” cities like New York, Chicago, or San Francisco, but a crop of newer, more sprawling urban regions primarily located in the Sun Belt and, surprisingly, the resurgent Great Plains. While Gotham and the Windy City have experienced modest growth and significant net domestic out-migration, burgeoning if often disdained urban regions such as Houston, Dallas-Ft. Worth, Charlotte, and Oklahoma City have expanded rapidly....

A few days ago, John Hinderaker asked why President Obama was putting so much effort into a seemingly futile political push on gun control. An article in today’s Washington Post, provides a possible answer. The piece suggests that the growth of suburbs in key states is changing the political calculus on guns in Congress. As population in many large states shifts from rural areas to suburbs, attitudes toward gun control shift accordingly.Look at it this way. Married parents in suburbs are a core Republican constituency. Rightly or wrongly, many of those parents think gun control might make their school-aged...

<p>Like many Americans who move to the suburbs, Tara Simons came to West Hartford, Conn., because she wanted her daughter to grow up in a nice, safe place with good schools.</p> <p>Tara Simons, left, and her daughter Alexis talk in their kitchen in West Hartford, Conn.</p>

This DOE project explores a variety of strategies designed to curb America’s greenhouse gas emissions up to 80 percent by about 2050. Arguably the most controversial of those reports covers the “effects of the built environment on transportation.” To put it plainly, the “built environment” report lays out strategies the federal government can use to force development away from suburbs and into cities, supposedly for the sake of reducing carbon dioxide emissions given off by all those suburban commuters. The Obama administration wants to force so-called smart growth policies on the country: get out of your car, stay out of...

Anytime a party suffers an unexpected defeat, there are two general responses: assigning blame and planning a better strategy for next time.After Jimmy Carter in 1980 was — in the words of CBS News’ Bob Schieffer — “whomped” by Ronald Reagan, Democrats went through both reactions. As would be expected, the Reagan victory caused much debate in Democratic Party circles about how to respond. (Mostly every Democrat except Jimmy Carter’s inner circle agreed that Democratic mistakes had greatly helped Reagan.) More traditional Democrats like Walter Mondale believed that Reagan’s victory was largely due to national anger over inflation and...

Back in May, I wrote a column laying out possible scenarios for the 2012 campaign different from the conventional wisdom that it would be a long, hard slog through a fixed list of target states, like the race in 2004. I thought alternatives were possible because partisan preferences in the half dozen years before 2004 were very stable, while partisan preferences over the last half dozen years have been anything but. Now, after Mitt Romney’s big victory in the October 3 debate and his solid performances in the October 16 and 22 debates, there is evidence that two of my...

Suburbanites of Ohio, listen up. As swing voters in the ultimate swing state, you will have an outsized impact on this election. President Obama has pledged to govern in the interests of middle-class voters like you. With so much resting on your shoulders, that is a promise you should scrutinize with care. What exactly are Obama’s plans for Ohio’s suburban communities? The answer may shock you. President Obama aims to help Ohio’s Democrats bail out your state’s struggling cities by forcibly transferring suburban tax money to urban treasuries. It’s a bold plan to redistribute the wealth of Ohio’s suburbs. It...