Comment: Democrats won't destroy suburbs; just remake them
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.”
The Willowsford development in Ashburn, Va., incorporates open space and agribusiness with suburban living. (Andre Chung / The Washington Post)
The Willowsford development in Ashburn, Va., incorporates open space and agribusiness with suburban living. (Andre Chung / The Washington Post)
Comment: Democrats won’t destroy suburbs; just remake them
Encouraging denser and more affordable housing is not going to wreck the suburban idyll.
Monday, November 2, 2020 1:30amOPINIONCOMMENTARY
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?
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