First there was Brown v. Board of Education, which made made racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional. And the federal government (and all fair-minded Americans) saw that it was good. Then in the 1970s and ‘80s, school districts (with a nod from the feds) instituted mandatory busing within their districts — and the age of social engineering was born.
Now forcing people to love their neighbors has never produced positive results, but that isn’t prevented the nation’s first black (correction: make that “black and white” [re-correction: make that “black”]) president from enforcing diversity within neighborhoods.
According to Fox News:
The Department of Housing and Urban Development is imposing a new rule that would allow the feds to track diversity in America’s neighborhoods and then push policies to change those it deems discriminatory.
The policy is called, ’Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing.’ It will require HUD to gather data on segregation and discrimination in every single neighborhood and try to remedy it.
HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan unveiled the federal rule at the NAACP convention in July.
‘Unfortunately, in too many of our hardest hit communities, no matter how hard a child or her [?] parents work, the life chances of that child, even her lifespan, is determined by the zip code she grows up in. This is simply wrong,’ he [she?] said.
Data from this “discrimination database” would be used to retool zoning laws, housing finance policy, and the planning of infrastructure and transportation.
Specifics are lacking but opponents are lining up to express their concerns. Fox quotes Ed Pinto, of the American Enterprise Institute, as saying:
This is just the latest of a series of attempts by HUD to social engineer the American people. It started with public housing and urban renewal, which failed spectacularly back in the 50’s and 60’s. They tried it again in the 90’s when they wanted to transform house finance, do away with down payments, and the result was millions of foreclosures and financial collapse.
Also troublesome to critics is that the HUD secretary, in announcing this proposed rule, blamed poverty on zip codes — rather than other socio-economic factors that studies have shown contribute to poverty.
