The Obama administration is moving forward with regulations designed
to help diversify America’s wealthier neighborhoods, drawing fire from
critics who decry the proposal as executive overreach in search of an
“unrealistic utopia.”
A final Department of Housing and Urban
Development (HUD) rule due out this month is aimed at ending decades of
deep-rooted segregation around the country.
The regulations would use grant money as an incentive for communities to
build affordable housing in more affluent areas while also taking steps
to upgrade poorer areas with better schools, parks, libraries, grocery
stores and transportation routes as part of a gentrification of those
communities.
“HUD is working with communities across the country to
fulfill the promise of equal opportunity for all,” a HUD spokeswoman
said. “The proposed policy seeks to break down barriers to access to
opportunity in communities supported by HUD funds.”
It’s a tough
sell for some conservatives. Among them is Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.),
who argued that the administration “shouldn’t be holding hostage grant
monies aimed at community improvement based on its unrealistic utopian
ideas of what every community should resemble.”
“American citizens
and communities should be free to choose where they would like to live
and not be subject to federal neighborhood engineering at the behest of
an overreaching federal government,” said Gosar, who is leading an
effort in the House to block the regulations.
Civil rights
advocates, meanwhile, are praising the plan, arguing that it is needed
to break through decades-old barriers that keep poor and minority
families trapped in hardscrabble neighborhoods. (Continues)
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