Senate Republicans, who locked hands with Democrats in a Kumbaya moment to further strip away our rights, have stopped an attempt to defund the Obama administration’s Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) regulation.

The AFFH is something we covered last year; it’s a new Obama administration regulation that is meant to radically alter the way your community looks, by setting up what essentially amounts to a national zoning board. Under AFFH regulations, the Obama administration has given the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) the task of remaking America.

The HUD regulation mandates that any community that receives HUD funding must now conduct detailed studies of its housing occupancy by race, ethnicity, national origin, English proficiency, class, and a whole slew of government data points that will then be housed in a national database. These data points will then be used by the federal government to force communities to rezone neighborhoods along income and racial specifications.

Here comes the National Zoning Board

The regulations basically turn HUD into a National Zoning Board, with the power to unilaterally rewrite local zoning laws and fundamentally reshape the American landscape.

Suburbs and small towns throughout the country will be forced to import minority and low-income populations into their communities in the name of equality and social engineering. New “high-density housing developments” — something most people would call government housing projects or ghettos — will be built in these communities to house people who cannot afford their new neighborhoods.

Senator Mike Lee (R), a vocal opponent of the regulation who attempted to defund the AFFH, released a statement after the Senate killed his amendment.

The original intent of the Fair Housing Act was to protect the God-given right of individuals and families – no matter their skin color or ethnicity – to buy and rent homes where they please. By contrast, the explicit purpose of HUD’s new rule is to empower federal bureaucrats to dictate where a community’s low-income residents will live. …The danger of AFFH is not that HUD will direct local governments and public housing authorities to make specific changes to their zoning policies. It will just threaten them, by tying obedience to federal Community Development Block Grants. CDBG is a federal-grant program controlled by HUD that allocates $3 billion per year to local governments to help them address a variety of community-development needs, including providing adequate and affordable public housing. Traditionally, local officials have been free to use their CDBG grant money according to their community’s needs and priorities. But under AFFH, HUD officials will withhold a local government’s CDBG funds unless that local government adopts HUD’s preferred housing policies.

President Obama, when the AFFH regualtion was announced last year, defended the government overreach and the government housing database by saying:

“By opening this data to everybody, everyone in a community can weigh in.” … “If you want affordable housing nearby, now you’ll have the data you need to make your case.”

Lee said in his floor speech on his amendment Wednesday that AFFH would “unilaterally rewrite local zoning laws and land-use regulations in every city and town in America.”

Say Goodbye to Single Family Homes!

As I pointed out last year when this regulation was first proposed, if you live in a nice single family home community you may soon find yourself in a neighborhood you barely recognize. In fact, it’s very possible that your community could be rezoned to build tracks of Section 8 apartment buildings — again a nice way of saying government housing projects.

Sound farfetched? Well just look at what Seattle Mayor Ed Murray’s advisory committee on housing tried doing in Seattle last year. In the name of equality, they actually set forth rules to ban single-family zoning in Seattle. And remember, just last month The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development began putting the finishing touches on regulations that will make living in an RV or a mobile Tiny Home illegal for most people. It seems the American Dream of home ownership is under attack at every level.