Housing Case Lets Feds Target ‘Unconscious’ Racism
Posted: Fri Jun 26, 2015 3:00 pmYou bought a house in an area where you wanted to live. Unfortunately there are others of the same race living there. You are now an unconscious racist. I told you the thought police were coming after you in an earlier post about the climate change police. (al gore said those who do not believe in climate change should be prosecuted) Now they are calling YOU racist because of your choice on where to raise your family. Below this article is the attack on you by HUD. It doesn't matter what color you are, you must live where they say you can, not where you choose to live. http://www.heritage.org/research/report ... on-program
So just how free are you? Baracula continues to suck the blood of the patriots that paid for your freedom.
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Worse than Obamacare: Housing Case Lets Feds Target ‘Unconscious’ Racism
Anthony Kennedy (Win McNamee / Getty)
Win McNamee / Getty
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government ... us-racism/
by Joel B. Pollak25 Jun 20150
As bad as the Supreme Court’s ruling in Obamacare was, the other decision it handed down on Thursday, in Texas Housing v. Inclusive Communities, is even worse.
Like the opinion in King v. Burwell, in which the Court effectively rewrote the plain language of the so-called Affordable Care Act, in Texas Housing the 5-4 majority decided that Congress had allowed claims of housing discrimination to be brought based on population statistics, when in fact it has never done so.
Now, plaintiffs do not need to show there was actual racial discrimination, or an intent to discriminate. Instead, they can just point to the racial makeup of a neighborhood and infer that discrimination must have happened in order to bring a lawsuit and force communities to re-engineer themselves.
The Court comforts itself by claiming that racial quotas still cannot be used to integrate communities. In fact, it has weaponized racial quotas in the hands of the federal government.
It is perhaps just a coincidence that the Texas Housing decision comes as the Department of Housing and Urban Development has announced a policy designed to pressure wealthy communities to build “affordable” housing in their midst.
The goal in Texas Housing, however, is not just to diversify neighborhoods, but to uncover what Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the majority, calls “unconscious prejudice.”
The dissent, written by Justice Samuel Alito, points out the absurdity of using “disparate impact” as a measure of racial discrimination. By the same logic, he writes, minimum wage laws must be racist, because they can be shown to have a disproportionately negative effect on young black males, who are priced out of the labor market. Alito also notes that neither the 1968 Fair Housing Act, nor its 1988 amendments, allowed “disparate impact” to be evidence of racial discrimination.
Yet that is how the Court has interpreted the statutes, on the argument that disparate impacts might be evidence of racial discrimination.
That may be reasonable in cases where money is not a main factor–like college admissions, for instance, where the fact that Ivy League universities admit Asian-American students at a lower rate than other schools makes for a possible case of discrimination. It is not reasonable, however, to use such statistics when the underlying factor is money–when there are some neighborhoods that are simply more expensive than others.
The courts cannot be expected to rearrange the socioeconomic structure of society–except, perhaps in the fevered imagination of a young radical named Barack Obama, circa 2001.
How bad is this decision? The federal government expected to lose–so much so, in fact, that it spent years settling cases on “disparate impact” before they could reach the Supreme Court, lest that tool of intimidation be taken away.
The Court has now affirmed one of the federal government’s most abusive tactics: the threat of racial discrimination lawsuits. And the biggest losers, Alito points out, are the poor, because now local efforts to improve poor neighborhoods can be blocked by lawsuits alleging racial discrimination when the rent is raised.
In the Obamacare case, the Court pretended to know what was really in the minds of legislators in spite of their explicit words (and evidence of their actual intent). In Texas Housing, the Court has ruled that the federal government can decide what is really in the minds of ordinary people, whether they intend to discriminate or not.
You may not know you are a racist–but you are, now.
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HUD’s Mandatory Minority Relocation Program
By Ronald D. Utt, Ph.D.
http://www.heritage.org/research/report ... on-program
President Obama’s Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) is beginning to insidiously intrude in local housing policies in a concerted effort to require racial and economic integration in American communities. It started in 2009, when HUD began using a settlement between the county of Westchester in New York and a civil rights organization as an opportunity to impose its own “fair housing” practices on the county.
HUD has already cut off some federal funding to the county for not taking more aggressive steps to move minority households into predominantly white neighborhoods. Rod Sims, then HUD’s Undersecretary, stated that this effort is designed to make Westchester an example for the rest of the country: “We’re clearly messaging other jurisdictions across the country that there has been a significant change in the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and we’re going to ask them to pursue similar goals as well.”[1] Congress should be aware of these plans and be prepared to push back.
The Court’s Relocation Plan and Settlement
Despite allegations of discrimination, the 2010 census reveals that Westchester County has the fourth most racially diverse population in the state of New York. Nonetheless, in 2006 the New York–based Anti-Discrimination Center (ADC) brought suit against the county on the grounds of “making false claims” in its application for HUD funding under the Community Development Block Grant program, which requires applicants to commit to fair housing goals. The ADC claimed that the county “failed to consider race-based impediments to fair housing choice and failed to identify and take steps to overcome such impediments.”[2] Importantly, the ADC suit claimed that the county violated the federal False Claims Act in its application, not that the county willfully maintained a policy of racial discrimination in housing.
The court denied motions to dismiss from both sides, and in early 2009, the county sought to have the Obama Administration intervene in the hope of a more reasonable settlement. With U.S. Department of Justice involvement, the agreed-upon settlement required Westchester to spend $51 million to build 750 subsidized housing units over the next seven years and that 630 of the units would be located in municipalities with fewer than 3 percent African-American residents and fewer than 7 percent Hispanic residents.
In effect, the settlement would compel minorities to live in distinctly non-minority communities. Recognizing that there may be some resistance among targeted minority beneficiaries to moving to such neighborhoods, the settlement also required the county to “affirmatively market affordable housing within the County and in geographic areas with significant non-white populations outside, but contiguous with or within close proximity to, the County.”[3] In effect, the court was encouraging Westchester to import minority families from other counties to meet its mandated integration targets.
HUD Intervenes
Despite the court settlement agreed to by both parties, HUD apparently saw the Westchester settlement—and the timid response of its Democrat-controlled county board—as an opportunity to renegotiate the settlement to advance a bolder “fair housing” agenda through its leverage over the federal funds it provides to the county. Specifically, HUD required[4] that Westchester:
* More thoroughly identify acts and patterns of discrimination on the basis of race, color, national origin, religion, sex, disability, or familial status, arguing that “the County describes itself as having a diverse population…but fails to explain and analyze its long history of segregation and the impact that segregation has had and may have on the future of fair housing choice for racial and ethnic minorities.”
* Identify “above average” schools and locate three-bedroom affordable housing units in these above-average school districts. In effect, HUD is expanding the settlement to include a school integration goal and increasing the cost of compliance by mandating that three-bedroom units be built as part of the agreed upon 750-unit build out.
* Challenge the zoning practices of local municipalities and “list the steps that the county will take if the municipalities do not enact the changes within three months of the County’s notification.”
* Pass “source-of-income”[5] legislation and sign into law, despite the fact that HUD has been unable to get the U.S. Congress to pass similar legislation and that similar legislation in New York State was recently vetoed.
* Test banks for mortgage lending discrimination and undertake enforcement efforts.
On top of all of these demands, HUD has outsourced the oversight of the compliance measures to the legal profession (described as a monitor, currently charging the county $990 per hour), who in turn has sought guidance from the academic community—in this case the Pratt Institute’s Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment. In turn, Pratt has suggested the creation of a third-party entity that would assume responsibilities for implementing the plan once the monitor’s seven-year tenure expires, thereby further disenfranchising the county’s elected officials for an indefinite period of time.
What HUD did not plan on when pursuing this aggressive social agenda was that the political leadership in Westchester would not always be as supine as those in office when it first challenged the county. Following the November 2009 election, the new county executive, Rob Astorino, stated his intention to push back on HUD’s efforts to substantially revise the court-approved agreement between the ADC and the county. Astorino is now making good on his promise.
More Relocation Programs on the Way
In an October 2011 speech at Pace University, HUD Assistant Secretary John Trasvina echoed the earlier threat by Under Secretary Sims when he said that the government’s housing settlement with Westchester should act as a “wake up call” for the nation. He noted that the government is “actively investigating” roughly 20 communities throughout the country.[6] Marin County, California, another soft target, is already in negotiation with HUD for a similar agreement,[7] and Dallas may soon be added to the list as a consequence of a False Claims Act suit initiated by disgruntled developers wanting to build HUD-subsidized housing.
What to Do
For starters, Congress should hold hearings on this new HUD policy and the remedies required to determine whether they are within HUD’s statutory authority and whether existing appropriations can be used to enforce such relocation plans. Westchester’s robust legal challenge to HUD’s vast intrusion into local housing policies should serve as a role model to fighting HUDs promised assault on another 20 communities.
So just how free are you? Baracula continues to suck the blood of the patriots that paid for your freedom.
..........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
Worse than Obamacare: Housing Case Lets Feds Target ‘Unconscious’ Racism
Anthony Kennedy (Win McNamee / Getty)
Win McNamee / Getty
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government ... us-racism/
by Joel B. Pollak25 Jun 20150
As bad as the Supreme Court’s ruling in Obamacare was, the other decision it handed down on Thursday, in Texas Housing v. Inclusive Communities, is even worse.
Like the opinion in King v. Burwell, in which the Court effectively rewrote the plain language of the so-called Affordable Care Act, in Texas Housing the 5-4 majority decided that Congress had allowed claims of housing discrimination to be brought based on population statistics, when in fact it has never done so.
Now, plaintiffs do not need to show there was actual racial discrimination, or an intent to discriminate. Instead, they can just point to the racial makeup of a neighborhood and infer that discrimination must have happened in order to bring a lawsuit and force communities to re-engineer themselves.
The Court comforts itself by claiming that racial quotas still cannot be used to integrate communities. In fact, it has weaponized racial quotas in the hands of the federal government.
It is perhaps just a coincidence that the Texas Housing decision comes as the Department of Housing and Urban Development has announced a policy designed to pressure wealthy communities to build “affordable” housing in their midst.
The goal in Texas Housing, however, is not just to diversify neighborhoods, but to uncover what Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the majority, calls “unconscious prejudice.”
The dissent, written by Justice Samuel Alito, points out the absurdity of using “disparate impact” as a measure of racial discrimination. By the same logic, he writes, minimum wage laws must be racist, because they can be shown to have a disproportionately negative effect on young black males, who are priced out of the labor market. Alito also notes that neither the 1968 Fair Housing Act, nor its 1988 amendments, allowed “disparate impact” to be evidence of racial discrimination.
Yet that is how the Court has interpreted the statutes, on the argument that disparate impacts might be evidence of racial discrimination.
That may be reasonable in cases where money is not a main factor–like college admissions, for instance, where the fact that Ivy League universities admit Asian-American students at a lower rate than other schools makes for a possible case of discrimination. It is not reasonable, however, to use such statistics when the underlying factor is money–when there are some neighborhoods that are simply more expensive than others.
The courts cannot be expected to rearrange the socioeconomic structure of society–except, perhaps in the fevered imagination of a young radical named Barack Obama, circa 2001.
How bad is this decision? The federal government expected to lose–so much so, in fact, that it spent years settling cases on “disparate impact” before they could reach the Supreme Court, lest that tool of intimidation be taken away.
The Court has now affirmed one of the federal government’s most abusive tactics: the threat of racial discrimination lawsuits. And the biggest losers, Alito points out, are the poor, because now local efforts to improve poor neighborhoods can be blocked by lawsuits alleging racial discrimination when the rent is raised.
In the Obamacare case, the Court pretended to know what was really in the minds of legislators in spite of their explicit words (and evidence of their actual intent). In Texas Housing, the Court has ruled that the federal government can decide what is really in the minds of ordinary people, whether they intend to discriminate or not.
You may not know you are a racist–but you are, now.
..............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
HUD’s Mandatory Minority Relocation Program
By Ronald D. Utt, Ph.D.
http://www.heritage.org/research/report ... on-program
President Obama’s Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) is beginning to insidiously intrude in local housing policies in a concerted effort to require racial and economic integration in American communities. It started in 2009, when HUD began using a settlement between the county of Westchester in New York and a civil rights organization as an opportunity to impose its own “fair housing” practices on the county.
HUD has already cut off some federal funding to the county for not taking more aggressive steps to move minority households into predominantly white neighborhoods. Rod Sims, then HUD’s Undersecretary, stated that this effort is designed to make Westchester an example for the rest of the country: “We’re clearly messaging other jurisdictions across the country that there has been a significant change in the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and we’re going to ask them to pursue similar goals as well.”[1] Congress should be aware of these plans and be prepared to push back.
The Court’s Relocation Plan and Settlement
Despite allegations of discrimination, the 2010 census reveals that Westchester County has the fourth most racially diverse population in the state of New York. Nonetheless, in 2006 the New York–based Anti-Discrimination Center (ADC) brought suit against the county on the grounds of “making false claims” in its application for HUD funding under the Community Development Block Grant program, which requires applicants to commit to fair housing goals. The ADC claimed that the county “failed to consider race-based impediments to fair housing choice and failed to identify and take steps to overcome such impediments.”[2] Importantly, the ADC suit claimed that the county violated the federal False Claims Act in its application, not that the county willfully maintained a policy of racial discrimination in housing.
The court denied motions to dismiss from both sides, and in early 2009, the county sought to have the Obama Administration intervene in the hope of a more reasonable settlement. With U.S. Department of Justice involvement, the agreed-upon settlement required Westchester to spend $51 million to build 750 subsidized housing units over the next seven years and that 630 of the units would be located in municipalities with fewer than 3 percent African-American residents and fewer than 7 percent Hispanic residents.
In effect, the settlement would compel minorities to live in distinctly non-minority communities. Recognizing that there may be some resistance among targeted minority beneficiaries to moving to such neighborhoods, the settlement also required the county to “affirmatively market affordable housing within the County and in geographic areas with significant non-white populations outside, but contiguous with or within close proximity to, the County.”[3] In effect, the court was encouraging Westchester to import minority families from other counties to meet its mandated integration targets.
HUD Intervenes
Despite the court settlement agreed to by both parties, HUD apparently saw the Westchester settlement—and the timid response of its Democrat-controlled county board—as an opportunity to renegotiate the settlement to advance a bolder “fair housing” agenda through its leverage over the federal funds it provides to the county. Specifically, HUD required[4] that Westchester:
* More thoroughly identify acts and patterns of discrimination on the basis of race, color, national origin, religion, sex, disability, or familial status, arguing that “the County describes itself as having a diverse population…but fails to explain and analyze its long history of segregation and the impact that segregation has had and may have on the future of fair housing choice for racial and ethnic minorities.”
* Identify “above average” schools and locate three-bedroom affordable housing units in these above-average school districts. In effect, HUD is expanding the settlement to include a school integration goal and increasing the cost of compliance by mandating that three-bedroom units be built as part of the agreed upon 750-unit build out.
* Challenge the zoning practices of local municipalities and “list the steps that the county will take if the municipalities do not enact the changes within three months of the County’s notification.”
* Pass “source-of-income”[5] legislation and sign into law, despite the fact that HUD has been unable to get the U.S. Congress to pass similar legislation and that similar legislation in New York State was recently vetoed.
* Test banks for mortgage lending discrimination and undertake enforcement efforts.
On top of all of these demands, HUD has outsourced the oversight of the compliance measures to the legal profession (described as a monitor, currently charging the county $990 per hour), who in turn has sought guidance from the academic community—in this case the Pratt Institute’s Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment. In turn, Pratt has suggested the creation of a third-party entity that would assume responsibilities for implementing the plan once the monitor’s seven-year tenure expires, thereby further disenfranchising the county’s elected officials for an indefinite period of time.
What HUD did not plan on when pursuing this aggressive social agenda was that the political leadership in Westchester would not always be as supine as those in office when it first challenged the county. Following the November 2009 election, the new county executive, Rob Astorino, stated his intention to push back on HUD’s efforts to substantially revise the court-approved agreement between the ADC and the county. Astorino is now making good on his promise.
More Relocation Programs on the Way
In an October 2011 speech at Pace University, HUD Assistant Secretary John Trasvina echoed the earlier threat by Under Secretary Sims when he said that the government’s housing settlement with Westchester should act as a “wake up call” for the nation. He noted that the government is “actively investigating” roughly 20 communities throughout the country.[6] Marin County, California, another soft target, is already in negotiation with HUD for a similar agreement,[7] and Dallas may soon be added to the list as a consequence of a False Claims Act suit initiated by disgruntled developers wanting to build HUD-subsidized housing.
What to Do
For starters, Congress should hold hearings on this new HUD policy and the remedies required to determine whether they are within HUD’s statutory authority and whether existing appropriations can be used to enforce such relocation plans. Westchester’s robust legal challenge to HUD’s vast intrusion into local housing policies should serve as a role model to fighting HUDs promised assault on another 20 communities.