Honestly, the Fair Housing Act of 1968‘s mandate to forcibly reduce segregation in housing feels like it came from an entirely different country. It never had a chance in the face of Nixon’s Southern Strategy, the busing controversy and, especially, after the Reagan Revolution in 1980.
That the Obama administration is going to try to resuscitate the mandate is more testimony that things are changing fast around here. And it’s going to meet some pretty unhinged opposition for the simple reason that you have to be about sixty years old to even remember a time when the federal government would attempt such a thing.
Lately, it’s definitely seemed like things have moved in the opposite direction with the consensus around Affirmative Action fraying badly and people largely forgetting that desegregated living patterns were ever a goal, let alone a legal mandate that the executive branch was supposed to aggressively pursue.
Be interesting how this meshes with self segregation.
Or he is trying to take more Republicans out with coronaries.
Not sure if this is on Obama’s “bucket” list, or if this is one of those Democratic feints that never amounts to anything.
Brilliant. Will the GOP governors will be issuing executive orders establishing housing segregation right before the KKK rally in SC? Will The Donald issue a statement and the front runner Jeb once again mumble a response? Oh, and Rand, will he go into hiding with all that freedom and liberty? Christie, hmmm, can he have an opinion on policy that does not have an established talking point? Walker, I await the Koch policy on housing segregation.
The Confederate Review is suitably impressed:
Well, the voice of Robert E. Lee’s plantation himself.
It seems the Weekly Copperhead is having similar gas pains.
It is a demonstrated effect that distribution of subsidized housing into more affluent communities in small enough numbers begins to deal with a lot of social problems. Or did in the mid-1980s.
What the reactionaries don’t tell you is that slavery, segregation, redlining, and other means of plunder were the real social engineering. Efforts to redress those barriers are a return to an open society.
There is one truth in that quote. It is a scandal that the mainstream press has largely refused to report on AFFH until the day of its final release.
And also on the effects that failing to dismantle de facto Jim Crow regulation from the 1950s has had on every community in the US.
I started a comment.
It grew.
Please read it.
I’ve lived it.
Y’might learn something.
REAL Desegregation. By Choice, Not By Decree.
Later…
AG
Supreme Court decision in Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. The Inclusive Communities Project.
Indeed. No doubt that decision allowed finalization of the rule.
This could be the most long-term significant of the amazing Court decisions of this term (marriage was going to happen anyway, with or without Scotus, and the ACA and Arizona redistricting cases were too stupid for even Kennedy to swallow). First step forward from a retrenchment from civil rights (and refusal to consider social science evidence) that’s been going on for decades.