By Ben Adler / Special To The Washington Post
White suburban swing voters are used to Republicans’ fearmongering appeals, but President Trump has added a new one to familiar warnings about street crime and sharia law: that Democrats would ruin the suburbs.
This talking point has been a staple of Trump’s stump speech, especially as he tries to make inroads with white women, who favored him by 9 percentage points in 2016 but now prefer former vice president Joe Biden by 7. (Suburban white women lean toward Biden by 13 points.) “Would you like a nice low-income housing project next to your suburban beautiful ranch-style house? Generally speaking, no,” Trump said two weeks agoin Muskegon, Mich. “I saved your suburbs — women — suburban women, you’re supposed to love Trump.” The president frequently says Democrats are against the whole idea of suburbs. “Biden will destroy your neighborhood and your American Dream,” he wrote in July, retweeting a New York Post article titled “Joe Biden’s disastrous plans for America’s suburbs.”
This dastardly scheme for the communities where a majority of Americans live is “to force suburban towns with single-family homes and minimum lot sizes to build high-density affordable housing smack in the middle of their leafy neighborhoods,” Betsy McCaughey wrote in that op-ed. This was a reference to the Obama administration’s Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) rule, which Trump recently repealed; and which Biden has said he would reinstate. It would not, as McCaughey claimed, require towns to provide housing that is “affordable even for people who need federal vouchers,” and it would not abolish single-family home zoning. But it’s true that the rule would require large jurisdictions that are exclusively affluent and white, because they allow nothing but single-family homes, to add other, more accessible housing, such as apartments. (It also contains measures to combat outright racial discrimination, such as when real estate agents steer families of color to certain towns and away from others.)
For Trump, all this is clearly more about the racial subtext than about land-use policy. As Elie Mystal, a Black writer for the Nation, put it: “My wife is a ‘suburban woman’ with two kids and a chicken pot pie recipe that makes people fight over the last piece. Somehow I don’t think Trump and the GOP are referring to her.” But many white suburbanites believe themselves to be anti-racist even as their communities remain homogenous thanks to exclusionary zoning, including in Democratic bastions such as the Clinton family’stown of Chappaqua, N.Y. These are the people Trump is hoping to win over. So even if his argument is in bad faith, it’s worth assessing. Would a few apartments wreck the suburban idyll?
They wouldn’t. Allowing a modicum of denser and therefore more affordable housing “destroys” suburbs only if you define them exclusively as places for single-family detached homes inhabited by middle-class or affluent (and implicitly white) families.
That does describe many American suburbs, especially outer-ring exurbs that tend to offer more support to Republican candidates. But it is not an accurate definition of suburbs historically, globally or from an urban-planning perspective. In fact, some of the healthiest suburbs with the brightest, most sustainable long-term trajectories are more “urban” ones with the mix of housing types — and, consequently, mix of populations — that Trump warns Democrats would impose. If Democrats actually did what Trump and his allies falsely allege they would do, the suburbs would be better off for it.
A sustainable community can accommodate not only people of different classes and races, but also the needs of residents throughout their lifetimes; and a typical suburban house is often too large, too expensive and too much to maintain for young single people or elderly empty-nesters. Suburbs that limit the production of housing also contribute to a shortage that is driving prices up and raising the age of median home buyers. “There are lots of different people who need different types of housing, and it’s healthy for a community to develop those; as well as [housing] for people who work there,” notes Debby Goldberg, vice president of housing policy at the National Fair Housing Alliance.
Before the advent of the automobile, the original “streetcar suburbs” of the late 19th century were often as dense and varied in housing types as many inner-city neighborhoods are today. Indeed, many of those areas, such as San Francisco’s Fillmore District, are now quintessential inner-city neighborhoods. They were built around mass-transit hubs: the ferry in Brooklyn Heights, the streetcar on Mount Pleasant Street in Washington, the trolley system in Boston neighborhoods such as Jamaica Plain. In the early 20th century, these areas were often incorporated into the major cities they abutted, if they weren’t already part of them, and newer suburbs farther afield were developed for cars.
The “streetcar suburbs” that remain outside core cities, such as Oak Park, next to Chicago, and Shaker Heights, near Cleveland, are renowned for their charm and high quality of life. That’s precisely because they are denser, more walkable, and more racially and economically diverse. Outside Boston, inner-ring transit-accessible communities such as Brookline and Cambridge top “best suburb” lists, while housing prices in the sprawling, farther-out suburban towns are still struggling to rebound from the last housing crash.
In the New York City region, some of the suburbs with the greatest appeal to millennial home buyers are the older, more diverse towns on the Hudson River and certain locales in New Jersey, such Montclair and Maplewood. Meanwhile, suburbs in Westchester and on Long Island with nothing but single-family homes and shopping malls are having trouble attracting younger residents.
Many younger Americans see racial and economic diversity as a desirable feature, not a blight to be avoided. As an affordable-housing expert explained to the New York Times in 2014, the largest population losses among young people occurred in “the least diverse communities with the most expensive housing, which happen also to be those that have almost no affordable multifamily housing.” Some of those Long Island suburbs, such as Westbury, are trying to “urbanize” and create downtowns to attract and retain residents. In other words, suburbanites worried about their property values should be clamoring for their local governments to do exactly what AFFH would have mandated.
To be sure, there are inner-ring suburbs that now face some of the challenges, such as poverty and crime, that cities do, including Compton, near Los Angeles, and Ferguson, a suburb of St. Louis. And there are also exclusive, monochromatic suburbs, consisting solely of detached houses, that are attracting well-heeled buyers, like Cherry Hills Village, Colo., and Paradise Valley, Ariz. But, as their forerunners like Westbury are now learning, growing and maintaining population for a century or more requires adaptability. Exurbs look a lot less appealing when gas prices rise, or when the current crop of McMansions becomes outdated and unfashionable.
In reality, the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s powers are so limited, and enforcement of the Fair Housing Act has always been so halfhearted, that the AFFH rule wouldn’t have imposed dramatic changes on American suburbs, anyway. It isn’t true, as McCaughey claims, that “towns that refused would lose their federal aid.” Typically, when a city is found to be in violation of a Fair Housing Act regulation, HUD works with local officials to correct the problem. “It is not HUD’s preference, under any administration, to withhold money,” says Goldberg. “It’s not where they go unless they have exhausted all their other options.” Even then, the only money HUD controls is its own money for housing programs, such as Community Development Block Grants, which are not major sources of funding for most exclusionary suburbs. There is hardly any precedent of such withholding. (It happened only once in recent years, when Westchester violated a consent decree.)
It’s too bad that Democrats wouldn’t go further in inducing suburbs to work to solve the crises of unaffordable housing and segregated neighborhoods, because it would be for the suburbs’ benefit. If that really destroyed the suburbs, then their destruction would be a good thing.
Ben Adler is senior editor at City & State NY.
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