Editor’s Note: This article is adapted from Spreading the Wealth: How Obama is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities, by Stanley Kurtz, from Sentinel HC.
President Obama is not a fan of America’s
suburbs. Indeed, he intends to abolish them. With suburban voters set to
be the swing constituency of the 2012 election, the administration’s
plans for this segment of the electorate deserve scrutiny. Obama is a
longtime supporter of “regionalism,” the idea that the suburbs should be
folded into the cities, merging schools, housing, transportation, and
above all taxation. To this end, the president has already put programs
in place designed to push the country toward a sweeping social
transformation in a possible second term. The goal: income equalization
via a massive redistribution of suburban tax money to the cities.
Obama’s plans to undercut the political and economic independence of
America’s suburbs reach back decades. The community organizers who
trained him in the mid-1980s blamed the plight of cities on taxpayer
“flight” to suburbia. Beginning in the mid-1990s, Obama’s mentors at the
Gamaliel Foundation (a community-organizing network Obama helped found)
formally dedicated their efforts to the budding fight against suburban
“sprawl.” From his positions on the boards of a couple of left-leaning
Chicago foundations, Obama channeled substantial financial support to
these efforts. On entering politics, he served as a dedicated ally of
his mentors’ anti-suburban activism.
The alliance endures. One of Obama’s original trainers, Mike
Kruglik, has hived off a new organization called Building One America,
which continues Gamaliel’s anti-suburban crusade under another name.
Kruglik and his close allies, David Rusk and Myron Orfield, intellectual
leaders of the “anti-sprawl” movement, have been quietly working with
the Obama administration for years on an ambitious program of social
reform.
In July of 2011, Kruglik’s Building One America held a conference at
the White House. Orfield and Rusk made presentations, and afterwards
Kruglik personally met with the president in the Oval Office. The
ultimate goal of the movement led by Kruglik, Rusk, and Orfield is quite
literally to abolish the suburbs. Knowing that this could never happen
through outright annexation by nearby cities, they’ve developed ways to
coax suburbs to slowly forfeit their independence.
One approach is to force suburban residents into densely packed
cities by blocking development on the outskirts of metropolitan areas,
and by discouraging driving with a blizzard of taxes, fees, and
regulations. Step two is to move the poor out of cities by imposing
low-income-housing quotas on development in middle-class suburbs. Step
three is to export the controversial “regional tax-base sharing” scheme
currently in place in the Minneapolis–St. Paul area to the rest of the
country.
Under this program, a portion of suburban tax money flows into a
common regional pot, which is then effectively redistributed to urban,
and a few less well-off “inner-ring” suburban, municipalities.
The Obama administration, stocked with “regionalist” appointees, has
been advancing this ambitious plan quietly for the past four years.
Efforts to discourage driving and to press development into densely
packed cities are justified by reference to fears of global warming.
Leaders of the crusade against “sprawl” very consciously use
environmental concerns as a cover for their redistributive schemes.
The centerpiece of the Obama administration’s anti-suburban plans is a
little-known and seemingly modest program called the Sustainable
Communities Initiative. The “regional planning grants” funded under this
initiative — many of them in battleground states like Florida,
Virginia, and Ohio — are set to recommend redistributive policies, as
well as transportation and development plans, designed to undercut
America’s suburbs. Few have noticed this because the program’s goals are
muffled in the impenetrable jargon of “sustainability,” while its
recommendations are to be unveiled only in a possible second Obama term.
Obama’s former community-organizing mentors and colleagues want the
administration to condition future federal aid on state adherence to the
recommendations served up by these anti-suburban planning commissions.
That would quickly turn an apparently modest set of regional-planning
grants into a lever for sweeping social change.
In light of Obama’s unbroken history of collaboration with his
organizing mentors on this anti-suburban project, and his proven
willingness to impose ambitious policy agendas on the country through
heavy-handed regulation, this project seems likely to advance.
A second and equally ambitious facet of Obama’s anti-suburban
blueprint involves the work of Kruglik’s Building One America.
Traditionally, Alinskyite community organizers mobilize leftist church
groups. Kruglik’s group goes a step further by organizing not only the
religious left but politicians from relatively less-well-off inner-ring
suburbs. The goal is to build coalitions between urban and inner-ring
suburban state legislators, in a bid to force regional tax-base sharing
on middle-class suburbanites. That is how the practice came to
Minnesota.
The July 2011 White House conference, gathering inner-ring suburban
politicians for presentations by Rusk and Orfield, was an effort to
place the prestige of the Obama administration behind Kruglik’s
organizing efforts. A multi-state battle over regional tax-base
“sharing,” abetted by the president, would usher in divisive class
warfare on a scale likely to dwarf the puny efforts of Occupy Wall
Street.
Obama’s little-known plans to undermine the political and economic
autonomy of America’s suburbs constitute a policy initiative similar in
ambition to health-care reform, the stimulus, or “cap-and-trade.”
Obama’s anti-suburban plans also supply the missing link that explains
his administration’s overall policy architecture.
Since the failure of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty and the collapse
of federal urban policy, leftist theorists of community organizing have
advocated a series of moves designed to quietly redistribute tax money
to the cities. Health-care reform and federal infrastructure spending
(as in the stimulus) are backed by organizers as the best ways to
reconstitute an urban policy without directly calling it that. A
campaign against suburban “sprawl” under the guise of environmentalism
is the next move. Open calls for suburban tax-base “sharing” are the
final and most controversial link in the chain of a reconstituted and
redistributive urban policy.
President Obama is following this plan.
Middle-class suburban supporters of the president take note. It isn’t
just the pocketbooks of the “1 percent” he’s after; it’s yours.
— Stanley Kurtz is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. This piece is adapted from his new book, Spreading the Wealth: How Obama Is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities.
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