Biden’s ‘Burb Blockbusting’ Program Defeated in CA in 2012

Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden has a “housing plan” to dissolve single-family residential zoning in California and elsewhere, robbing city budgets of suburbs, and transferring those funds to poorer (“sanctuary”) cities. In essence, suburbs would be annexed into nearby large cities. Biden calls it a “fundamental transformation,” justified by the coronavirus crisis.

Think of Beverly Hills becoming part of Los Angeles and having to share its city revenues with Compton or East Los Angeles. Think of a poverty pocket being transferred to upscale Rodeo Drive. Or think of Atherton and Palo Alto in northern California being incorporated into San Francisco with a “little city” of homeless persons planted in the center of each city. Suburbs would be abolished along with the police, ICE, bail and suburban home rule.

The way this would be accomplished is by conditioning the receipt of federal road, housing and education funds to compliance with “blockbusting” policies, although Biden does not use that term. Suburban cities could refuse the federal funding, but then they could be sued for “systemic racism” or its retail district threatened to be burned down, as in Minneapolis.

This takeover of land use governance of suburbs would have three prongs to it:

1. Use of a housing quota system to force “economic integration” in the suburbs and relocating city residents to suburbs
2. Regulating housing development, automobile use and limiting suburban road repairs to force commuters into public transit and compel suburbanites back into the city (as in Europe)
3. Regionalizing suburban city budgets with poorer cities in a revenue-sharing scheme.

A consequence of the above would be that home values in the suburbs would plummet and the tax base would erode. Elected officials in suburbs would merely have symbolic roles.

California Proposition 31 – 2012

Joe Biden’s proposed “Housing Plan” is an eerie repeat of California’s proposed Proposition 31 in 2012 and very similar to the current Coronavirus emergency and race riot strategies.

As preposterous as Biden’s “housing plan” seems, a similar plan was on the ballot in California in 2012, but lost at the polls by 60.5 to 39.5 percent. It was sold to the voters as a “good government” ballot initiative called Proposition 31 (numerically the reverse of Proposition 13). At that time, it was endorsed by both the Democrat and Republican Party. It bought off Republican opposition by promising big transportation project funding for developers. The Republican Lincoln Club of Orange County endorsed the initiative because it would offer more redevelopment (e.g., eminent domain, demolition of older, cheap housing, replacement with higher tax producing central business districts that are now becoming obsolescent due to globalization, staged race riots and arson).

Like the current virus epidemic and race riot emergencies, Proposition 31 would have granted the governor power cut or eliminate any existing program “during a fiscal emergency” to usurp local government decisions on where to spend state or federal funds. The governor could divert funds to regional Strategic Action Plan (SAP’s) groups to form “joint powers authorities” to sap monies from suburban cities. This would have also usurped the state legislature’s power to determine government expenditures. This is precisely what is occurring under the Coronavirus emergency.

‘Progressive urbanists’ long-cherished dream of abolishing the suburbs is now within reach’ – Stanley Kurtz

Urban policy expert Stanley Kurtz has been trying to draw attention to this “blockbusting” policy, given that the mainstream media has a “blackout” on covering it. Back in 2012 Kurtz wrote a book warning about similar policies during the Obama Administration titled “Spreading the Wealth: How Obama is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities.”

My article “Prop 31 Would Regionalize state revenue sharing” appeared in August 2012. Kurtz named me as single-handedly turning public opinion around in California on Proposition 31.

But Biden’s housing plan wouldn’t even require a vote in California or anywhere else. If Biden is elected and the U.S. Senate is controlled by the Democrat Party, Biden is promising this “fundamental transformation.”

California has been the location of a number of socially-engineered race riots in Watts (1965) to block-bust white neighborhoods of former aero-space workers for Blacks migrants from the South, and the Los Angeles Riots of 1992 to block-bust older neighborhoods to provide cheap housing for South American immigrants for cheap labor for wholesale import districts in the first ring of housing around the city center.

California suburbs could become like a scene out of the epic movie “Dr. Zhivago” where a mansion owned in 1917 Moscow is split into tenements by the revolutionary Bolshevik Party. As a scene in that movie describes it: “the private life would be dead.” (See movie trailer here)