Agenda 21: Coming Soon to a Neighborhood Near You Courtesy of HUD's Fair Housing Rules

I have written extensively about Agenda 21 over the past two years, but I have seen a sharp increase in its U.S implementation since the 2012 presidential elections. President Obama, who once told us his Administration was focused "like a laser beam" on jobs, is using his second term to focus like a laser beam on climate change policies and promoting Smart Growth and sustainable development initiatives. In the absence of a federal climate change bill, most Americans don't take these efforts very seriously, but the president has used the power of executive order coupled with existing federal agencies such as the EPA to implement many of his anti-business, pro-environment policies sans Congressional involvement.

 

For anyone unaware, Agenda 21 is a 1992 United Nations' policy document that calls for using radical environmental initiatives to destroy the wealth and affluence of Western nations--particularly the United States. Agenda 21 proponents call for an end to private property ownership and national sovereignty. People are to be packed into densely crowded urban areas which the document calls "human settlements" and much of the U.S. is to be rewilded into national forests and nature preserves. Western wealth and affluence are the enemy of global environmentalism, and the processes which produce these, including individual rights, national sovereignty, the Constitution and our entire way of life as Americans has to be destroyed for the goals of Agenda 21 to be fully implemented. The latest and most disturbing effort I have seen to implement the "sustainable" living initiatives is the new HUD Fair Housing Rule announced on July 16. HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan, speaking at the NAACP convention on that date, announced a new series of Fair Housing initiatives designed to counter what he calls a "subtle" form of discrimination against minorities and the underprivileged:

 

Today, it’s about more than just addressing outright discrimination and access to the housing itself. It’s also about giving every community access to important neighborhood amenities that can make a tremendous difference in a person’s life outcome. I’m talking about good schools, safe streets, jobs, grocery stores, healthcare and a host of other important factors. To help families gain this access – HUD is working to strengthen our stewardship of federal dollars to maximize the impact they have on communities in advancing fair housing goals. As all of you know, HUD’s programs provide funding to partners at the state and local level. As part of the Fair Housing Act—for members of the protected classes—these partners have an obligation to affirmatively further fair housing opportunities – otherwise known as AFFH. But as you and many others, including the Government Accountability Office, have noted, this has proven largely to be a meaningless paper exercise without any teeth. The process has long been broken and we’re determined to fix it and help it reach its full promise. That’s why I am proud to announce that this week we will publish a new rule to bring affirmatively further fair housing into the 21st century. This rule focuses on the traditional tenets of discrimination – and also gets at the essential issues of access to opportunity so imperative to 21st century equity. Specifically, this new rule will: • provide a clear definition of what it means to affirmatively further fair housing; • outline a standard framework with well-defined parameters; and • offer targeted guidance and assistance to help grantees complete this assessment. Perhaps most important—for the first time ever—HUD is providing data for every neighborhood in the nation, detailing what access African American families, and other members of protected classes, have to the community assets I talked about earlier – including jobs, schools and transit. With this data and the improved AFFH process, we can expand access to high opportunity neighborhoods and draw attention to investment possibilities in underserved communities. Make no mistake: this is a big deal. With the HUD budget alone, we are talking about billions of dollars. And as you know, decades ago, these funds were used to support discrimination. Now, they will be used to expand opportunity and bring communities closer to the American Dream.

 

Having worked in real estate finance for 15 years, I can say for a certainty that Fair Housing laws that have been in place for over 40 years protect minorities against discrimination in housing choices. There are laws against redlining (refusing to lend in neighborhoods comprised of primarily one ethnic group), laws against refusing to lease or sell to people of a specific ethnic group, and numerous fair lending laws. Donovan knows perfectly well that minorities in the US who are well qualified--with good credit and high incomes--are able to purchase homes wherever they choose and obtain excellent financing. The issues come into play with borrowers who have poor credit history, sketchy job history, or both. What Donovan is talking about is not traditional Fair Housing laws, but rather the type of mixed income housing that Smart Growth, Sustainability and New Urbanism require. Because Agenda 21 requires that people live very densely together, it seeks to make high income people neighbors with low income people--an arrangement which usually is pleasing to neither group. Plus, Smart Growth and Sustainable development city plans have the effect of making housing units very expensive, which hits low income and lower middle income families hardest. So rather than improving the situations of lower income people, Smart Growth policies tend to make their housing situations worse.

 

Stanley Kurtz has written an excellent article in the National Review Online about how the HUD initiative is just the latest attempt by the Obama Administration to force people out of suburbs and into tightly packed urban housing where rich and poor live together. What HUD is doing is basically proactively requiring communities with no proven history of discrimination to integrate their communities so that lower income families will have a chance to live in higher income communities. This is the heart of New Urbanism.

 

As an example of such an attempt, Kurtz details the case "Plan Bay Area", a metropolitan plan which would essentially end suburbs in the San Francisco area by forcing all new development to take place in the city's existing urban foot print. The bullying tactics that Kurtz' article describes in the Plan Bay Area meetings are actually a very normal part of the process for pushing through metropolitan planning initiatives that promote New Urbanism and Smart Growth. Residents (of all income levels) tend to really resist these initiatives, so the town hall meetings and other public forums are primarily just for show. Participation is meant to be limited at these meetings so that as few residents as possible will know what is happening to change their communities and the resistance that does show up can be contained. Rosa Koire, founder of Democrats Against Agenda 21, and author of Behind the Green Mask, talks about her experiences dealing with this in California as Smart Growth planners tried to shout down all efforts to stop city plans that would "Manhattanize" communities. My own experience of dealing with the "Plan El Paso" initiative mirrors Koire's--the city planners don't want input at all--they just want to silence dissent.

 

Even though George H.W. Bush signed onto the principles of Agenda 21 and every U.S. President since has upheld and furthered its objectives, without a national climate change bill, those initiatives have not moved very far forward. Even the Plan Bay Area initiative had to be scaled back and confined to just a few neighborhoods because of public outcry.

 

That makes what the Obama Administration is doing now so crucial--and so scary. By using HUD as a hammer to proactively charge developers of communities with discrimination if they do not comply with Smart Growth and sustainable housing initiatives, the President is implementing Agenda 21's housing policies without the need of Congressional approval. HUD's new rule can even be used to bully states like Alabama that have passed laws rejecting Agenda 21. By using Fair Housing laws as an enforcement piece, the President can make sure that his radical initiatives for remaking this country are enforced in every city and every state, regardless of what we the people think.

 

Kurtz ends his article by saying that it is time for us to have a national conversation about Obama's war on the suburbs. He is right, but we need more than a conversation.  We need to stand up and pull the mask off his policies and expose them for what they are--a radical attempt to remake our society. The Obama Administration is using federal agencies to push a globalist agenda that is at odds with personal liberty, the Constitution of the United States, the Bill of Rights and all of the freedoms that these documents afford us. We need to demand that our Congressional representatives hold him accountable for his actions. And we need to do it sooner rather than later, while we still have freedoms to protect.

 

 

Find out more about Agenda 21, what it means, how it is being implemented, and what you can do about it by watching this video:  Agenda 21: Bankrupting America into Utopia One City at a Time. 

 Alexandra Swann is the author of No Regrets: How Homeschooling Earned me a Master's Degree at Age Sixteen and several other books. Her novel, The Planner, about an out of control, environmentally-driven federal government implementing Agenda 21, is available on Kindle and in paperback. For more information, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net.

Read Joyce Swann's Looking Backward: My Twenty-Five Years as a Homeschooling Mother Free on Kindle now through August 6th.