Scott Van Voorhis

Our improbable president-elect is a hard one to read, with everyone and his brother trying to guess which parts of the Obama legacy will be the first to get the royal flush.

But I would make a good bet that somewhere on Trump’s hit list is the Obama Administration’s typically feeble attempt to take on the NIMBY blowhards in our nation’s suburbs.

In theory, anyway, the Department of Housing and Urban Affairs, through its “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing” initiative, has pledged to take on suburban communities that block affordable housing from being built with a byzantine thicket of obstructionist zoning rules and reviews.

However, in practice, this bold-sounding Obama initiative has proved to be remarkably flaccid, with Westchester County, that stretch of uber-wealthy New York bedroom communities with a population of over 1 million, having successfully defied the feds since 2009 over demands that it open the door to a paltry 750 affordable apartments.

Closer to home, Newton has spent the last few years successfully boxing out hundreds of new apartments proposed under the Bay State’s affordable housing, triggering complaints to HUD by the developers.

So why is this clearly flawed but worthy initiative likely doomed? For starters, the program has sparked outrage in right-wing circles, who, in their race to embrace ever kookier ideas, have blasted it as some sort of diabolic plot by Obama to destroy the suburbs.

In a more telling sign, among those floated as a possible HUD secretary in the incoming Trump Administration is the very same Westchester County executive that has made a mockery of Obama’s bid to tackle NIMBYism, essentially telling the federal government to stick it.

And then there’s our very own Scott Brown, another name that was floated as a possible HUD czar. Brown, as I’ve noted more than once on these pages, was no fan of our state’s affordable housing law when he was a little-known Republican state senator from Wrentham.

Smoke Signals From Trump Tower    

OK, it’s hard to imagine that a Trump Administration will be a complete downer for housing – as long as the economy holds up, luxury housing should continue to boom for now at least. The signs of overbuilding are frankly all over the place, but that typically never stops anyone from building more until it’s too late.

Get ready for lots of tax breaks for posh new hotels and condo towers in supposedly “distressed” neighborhoods – to be fair, it’s a tactic pioneered over the years by more than one Democratic mayor of Boston.

But efforts to force upscale suburbs to open their doors to a broader range of housing – and to a broader range of buyers and renters as well – are likely to face an uphill battle as our country lurches to the right.

As it pushes to open up wealthy Westchester County to a paltry few hundred units of affordable housing, Obama’s HUD contends it is trying to provide opportunities for minority renters in New York’s suburbs, which, like the Boston area’s richest ZIP codes, are almost exclusively white.

The backstory here is shameful. Westchester County had pocketed tens of millions of dollars in federal affordable housing money over the years, but had done little or nothing to prod local communities to revamp zoning rules that effectively block out new apartment projects that might attract minority renters. In fact, it was a lawsuit by an activist group in New York that triggered the federal intervention in the first place.

But thanks to Rob Astorino, Westchester County’s top executive and one of the potential candidates to take over HUD in the new Trump Administration, that drive has gone nowhere over the past seven years.

Astorino has been openly defiant, accusing the federal government of trying to take away “home rule” by dismantling obstructionist zoning (not coincidentally, it’s a battle cry often used here in Massachusetts as our own NIMBY blowhards rally against proposals to build apartments that would be affordable to teachers, firefighters, construction workers, shop clerks and waiters).

It goes without saying that Astrorino, if appointed secretary of HUD, would quickly put the kibosh on any attempts to force upscale suburbs to take down the zoning walls they’ve erected to keep out not just minorities, but increasingly middle- and working-class families as well.

Nor can we expect much of a difference if Scott Brown gets the nod.

Brown now serves on the executive committee of a respectable nonprofit dedicated to coming up with ways to make housing more affordable.

But Brown was an unabashed opponent of the Bay State’s affordable housing law, Chapter 40B, which gives developers the ability to bypass local zoning to build new apartments and condos in suburbs, towns and cities where less than 10 percent of the housing stock is affordable.

In order to help some of the suburbs in his legislative district foil developers with hopes of using 40B to build badly needed new apartments, Brown pushed a remarkably putrid proposal: letting NIMBY suburbs count jail cells as affordable housing to meet the 10 percent threshold, a frankly stomach-turning tactic if there ever was one.

Why It Matters

All that said, even if some of the more conventional candidates that have been mentioned win the HUD job, it’s hard to imagine any Republican in what has become a hard-right party going anywhere near this Obama initiative.

And that is a real shame, for in taking on the NIMBYies in the New York suburbs over efforts to keep out housing that might attract minority renters, the Obama Administration, intentionally or otherwise, put its finger on one of the biggest factors driving up home prices and rents across the country: purposely byzantine local building restrictions.

The zoning barriers that suburbs in Boston, New York, San Francisco and other major cities across the country have built up over the decades are not only limiting housing opportunities for African-Americans, Latinos and other minorities, they are increasingly blocking out new housing for
middle-class families as a whole. And as builders get blocked out and construction lags, prices rise.

Realistically, it is going to take intervention by federal and state governments to force local communities to take down the zoning walls that are slowly but surely strangling the residential construction market.

Of course, this is exactly the kind of red tape that Republicans like to bellyache so much about when it comes to government regulation of Wall Street, but are strangely silent when it comes to something freeing up builders to put up homes and apartments.

If it says anything, HUD’s “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing” is the boldest initiative that no one has ever heard of, whether by design or incompetence. But like a lot of Obama programs, it appears to be another toothless wonder, which is too bad.

There’s clearly been no attempt by the feds to take on the zoning wall Greater Boston’s wealthiest suburbs have put up against just about all housing except McMansions, but given the Westchester debacle, maybe that’s not all that surprising.

Yet as timid and as halting as it was, the Obama Administration’s attempt to take on the NIMBYies was a small step in the right direction. Soon enough, though, we probably won’t even have that.