Trump Shoots for “Outside” Suburban Voters
As the 2020 presidential election nears the finish line, President Donald Trump is scratching for every last suburban voter — often a fertile group of independents — by calling Joe Biden a threat to their way of life. The essence of the Trump appeal is that voters in the burbs in single-family homes should feel threatened by the prospect of a Biden- administration-supported injection of duplexes and triplexes into their quiet, grassy lives.
Trump’s political instincts tell him to roll up suburban voters as a counter point to his outreach to urban voters who may be unhappy with the failure of local political and law enforcement officials to quell the violence and looting that has accompanied Black Lives Matter marches in places like Portland and Kenosha.
“They are going to destroy our suburbs,” he said at a press conference August 31 when discussing violence in Democratic-run cities. “But I took care of that,” referring to his 2018 cancellation of the Obama Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) rule.
Trump is playing the equivalent of what in basketball is called “the inside, outside” game where you win with both a big man down low near the basket who is a scoring threat complimented by accurate gunners outside the three-point line. Trump hopes to win by convincing independent voters that they are going to get thumped by Joe Biden and Democratic “inside/outside” policies which will make both cities and suburbs unlivable.
Biden and other Democrats have already shown they are worried about headway Trump is making with his claims about Democratic-run cities. Now Trump is adding the “suburbs” to his one-two political punch. Biden has opened the door to the claim. His presidential website criticizes “exclusionary zoning” which he says has kept people of color and low-income families out of certain communities. He advocates for legislation “requiring any state receiving federal dollars through the Community Development Block Grants (CDBG) or Surface Transportation Block Grants to develop a strategy for inclusionary zoning, as proposed in the Home Act of 2019 by Majority Whip Rep. James Clyburn and Senator Cory Booker,” both Democrats.
That legislation echoes the Obama rule Trump eliminated in 2018: the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) rule. The AFFH rule required municipal jurisdictions that receive CDBG from HUD to file a report identifying barriers to fair housing and set goals for overcoming them. Failure to file the report, called an Assessment of Fair Housing (AFH), could result in HUD withholding that jurisdiction’s block-grant money.
Democrats aren’t just talking about eliminating single-family zoning, they are doing it. It has been prohibited in cities like Minneapolis and Portland, both on the grounds of racial equity — that is usually the primary reason given — but also, where a broader argument is made, that less expensive housing would allow public employees like teachers and police to live closer to where they work, when they work in high-cost housing areas like Arlington, Virginia, my home town.
The Arlington County Board has for the past year laid the groundwork for the elimination of single-family zoning, either entirely or in certain areas. The objective is to allow duplexes and triplexes to be build in North Arlington where existing homes are put on the market for $1 million and new McMansions for $2.5 million and up. In a letter to an interested party in the lead up to a Zoom meeting on September 2, 2020, Richard Tucker, Housing Arlington Coordinator, explained: “What the map, below, shows, is that the neighborhoods north and south of Columbia Pike, where there is more diversity of housing types, there is also a greater degree of non-white population. In areas where SF housing is the exclusive use, racial diversity is lower.”
It is fair to argue that restrictive housing covenants and local laws of the past kept African Americans out of some neighborhoods in what are now the ostensibly weller-to-do sections of Arlington, and to some extent prevented some Blacks from building family wealth through home ownership.
That said, it is hard to imagine that in this day and age there is a single person in north Arlington who would quake at the thought of a Black family moving in next door. There are Black families living in my neighborhood already. Most of us would welcome further diversity. Moreover, it is a somewhat racist argument in and of itself to think there are no Blacks who can afford either a $1 million home or a $2.5 million McMansion.
That begs the question, of course, whether a $1 million home in north Arlington sold to a developer and converted to a duplex or triplex would in fact be “affordable” housing, which Arlington refers to as “missing middle” housing. The typical formula used by developers is the 1/3–1/3–1/3 rule: the cost of buying the property, the cost of putting up the structure and the profit margin. It is a dubious proposition that application of that equation to a $1 million home would yield two or three “missing middle” units when the builder is looking to recoup $3 million.
And even in a state like Virginia which has gone from red to blue, the support for dotting suburbs with duplexes is dubious. Late last year, Delegate Ibraheem Samirah introduced a bill in the House of Delegates in the Virginia legislature. His HB152 requires all localities to allow development or redevelopment of “middle housing” residential units upon each lot zoned for single-family residential use. Middle housing is defined as two-family residential units, including duplexes, townhouses, cottages, and any similar structure. The bill did not get any attention from delegates in 2020 and Samirah will try again in 2021. But even he acknowledges “this is a divisive bill that some people dislike heartily.” That is reflected in the fact that local cities and counties throughout Virginia and their trade associations have come out against the Samirah bill.
Even in bluer Oregon there is strong opposition at the local level to Oregon’s House Bill 2001 — which was approved on August 8, 2019 — which mandates cities with a population more than or equal to 25,000 must allow higher density housing types such as fourplexes and townhomes in areas previously zoned for the development of single-family housing. Cities between 10,000 and 25,000 population would have to allow duplexes in single- family zoned areas.
The MR Report on July 28, 2020 carried a story which included: “People are absolutely outraged,” said City Commissioner Amanda Fritz, who is the Portland City Council’s liaison to the League of Oregon Cities, according to a November edition of the Willamette Week. “There were multiple people saying it needs to be repealed.” West Linn, Oregon, Mayor Russ Axelrod also referred to the legislation as “stupid” during a work session last year, according to the Willamette Week.
Trump’s recent efforts to stoke reasonable objections to the elimination of single-family zoning go hand-in-hand with his disparagement of Democratic-run cities. There is no question he is “going negative.” One might like it to be otherwise. But that is Donald Trump: a nasty, master of the “inside, outside” game.
