Readers Write: Fair housing posed threat to Nassau’s lifestyle dream

The Island Now

Your Aug. 7 editorial “The Suburban Lifestyle Dream” was an unfair and biased representation of the very real dangers to suburban living of the recently rescinded Affirmative Furthering Fair Housing, a regulation put into effect by the Obama-Biden administration, and one which is certain to be reinstated if Biden and Harris win the national election.
AFFH, like so many Trojan horses (“we have to pass it to find out what’s in it”) was never passed by Congress, but was a regulation put into law by Obama’s pen. It gives the federal government unprecedented powers to rule over local governments to an extent the average suburban resident is largely unaware of.
Leaving aside the usual Democratic Party-media complex rhetoric you indulge in, (charges of racism used to cloak a radical agenda) the AFFH (Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing is the Orwellian name attached to it) permits the federal government to use the threat of withholding federal transportation funding and other block grants to eliminate single-family housing. Single-family zoning suburban living is a cornerstone of the middle-class dream. The reality of AFFH is that it furthers massive federal over-reach, not fair housing.
Your editorial disingenuously argues that since AFFH under Obama-Biden didn’t affect Nassau County too badly, it must not be dangerous. Yet one need only look a short distance north to see how Westchester County was threatened and succumbed to the all powerful federal government in a settlement which cost the taxpayers of Westchester tens of millions as they were forced to build low-cost housing.
Middle-class homeowners of all races are facing a stealth threat to their way of existence in single-family homes which they worked and saved hard to pay for, only to be taken away under the guise of “affordable housing.” So, too, is the federalist plan form of freedom for local government laid down by our founding fathers.

Peter Verdirame
Port Washington

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