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President Donald Trump smiles for photographs during a media appearance on Aug. 3, 2020. He recently explained his administration’s rescinding of an Obama-era Fair Housing rule as an effort to protect the “Suburban Lifestyle Dream.” Photo by Tia Dufour | Official White House photo
Hands down the worst president in history – move over Buchanan, Harding and Nixon – President Donald Trump’s unabashed incompetence, racism and embrace of white supremacy, and the fanatical support he has received from a significant chunk of American populace, has surfaced ugly divides, beliefs and prejudices that many previously chose to ignore or minimize.
His recent rant against “low-income housing,” in which he pledged to bar low-income housing from suburban neighborhoods, is just the latest example.
In his July 29 tweet, Trump exposed an unpleasant truth lurking just beneath the surface – and occasionally right in the open – about decades of resistance in Boston’s suburbs and elsewhere to the construction of new housing, especially apartments and especially anything with the “affordable” label.
It’s not always just about traffic, school costs, and “density,” the favorite talking points of housing opponents.
Alongside and sometimes fueling all the talk about defending neighborhood “character” against carpet-bagging developers are racist fears that building subsidized apartments will attract low-income Black and other minority families to town, wrecking schools and driving down property values.
And more than anyone maybe would like to admit, those fears are expressed rather openly, as opponents fume that a new project will bring “Section 8” tenants to town, or holler that a new apartment project will morph into the stereotypical urban public housing project, complete with gang shootouts and rampant drug dealing.
Covering real estate and development in the Boston area over the past 25 years, I’ve heard it all, and, for that matter, so have any number of housing advocates, planners, developers and others who have sat late into the evening at various public hearings on apartment proposals large and small.
Of course, the fears have little relation to either the reality of urban poverty, or even what is on the table actually being proposed.
One popular line I’ve heard a few times about proposed apartment buildings is that “I moved out the city to escape this stuff.” What exactly that means – and whether it really involved any firsthand knowledge – is often unclear, with the purpose being to assert some sort of superficial street cred.
But more likely than not, fears that new apartment buildings will open the door to a deluge of crime, drugs and poverty stems from a society obsessed with TV police and crime dramas and the sensationalized crime reporting that’s the staple of local broadcast news.
Reality Versus Ravings
It was to just this segment of blockheads that Trump was apparently hoping to appeal to with his now–infamous attack on affordable housing.
“I am happy to inform all of the people living their Suburban Lifestyle Dream that you will no longer be bothered or financially hurt by having low income housing built in your neighborhood,” he wrote. “Your housing prices will go up based on the market, and crime will go down. I have rescinded the Obama-Biden [Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing] Rule. Enjoy!”
True to form, Trump doubled down amid the predictable blowback, later warning in a virtual town hall event targeted at Wisconsin voters that Democrats want to could “eliminate single-family zoning, bringing who knows into your suburbs,” according to an account from the Washington Post.
Not surprisingly, these latest presidential ravings bear little relation to reality.
The Obama Administration’s Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule was a long overdue and relatively mild attempt to prod suburban towns to examine decades of zoning rules and other restrictions that have boxed out affordable housing and kept many suburban towns overwhelmingly white.
It was certainly not a blueprint for building 1960s-style public housing towers in the middle of suburban neighborhoods, as Trump suggested.
In Greater Boston, developers are simply not building new apartment projects filled with subsidized units, for which there is little financial support from the government or from financial markets.
Rather, they erect market rate complexes with 15 or 20 percent of the apartments rented out at below–market rents, with the other 80 percent leased out at market rate rents of $2,500 and up, carrying the project.
Facts Don’t Matter to Some
While there is a desperate need for both more Section 8 vouchers and more places to live for low-income workers, these new developments aren’t designed for that.
Yet none of what I am arguing right now would matter to Trump.
Presented with the facts, our Very Stable Genius would surely respond by blasting Greater Boston’s well-tended suburban apartment communities and their smattering of affordable units as hellholes unfit for human residence.
And sadly, Trump has a willing and ready audience for his lies among the NIMBY-types who routinely rail against such projects when they are proposed in the suburbs of Boston and elsewhere.
Scott Van Voorhis
Trump’s original tweet garnered more than 194,000 likes and nearly 90,000 retweets.
While it’s anyone’s guess how many came from irate suburbanites in Greater Boston, I suspect there were at least a few locals hitting the like button.
And thanks to Trump, its clearer than ever before just what some of the opposition in the suburbs to new rental housing is truly all about.
Scott Van Voorhis is Banker & Tradesman’s columnist; opinions expressed are his own. He may be reached at sbvanvoorhis@hotmail.com.
