Stanley Kurtz writes for National Review Online about events that offer a glimpse into a second term for President Biden.
A 2021 state zoning law designed to densify Boston’s suburbs and push suburbanites out of their cars has set off a rebellion in the town of Milton, Mass. That revolt now appears to be spreading across the Greater Boston area. In more ways than one, the zoning brushfire now sweeping through Boston’s suburbs foreshadows a second Biden term.
Massachusetts anticipates Biden, first, because the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority {META} Communities Act — the state law now riling Boston’s environs by usurping local zoning authority — operates quite like the controversial federal Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) regulation that Biden is poised to revive if reelected. Second, Biden has decided to put housing at the center of his reelection campaign, including a promise to use billions in new federal funding to induce states to enact laws like the MBTA Communities Act.
If anything, then, the zoning battle now blazing across Massachusetts is a pale shadow of what we’d be in for under a second Biden term. The federal AFFH is significantly more intrusive than even the MBTA Communities Act, and the resurrection of Obama’s notorious AFFH rule is sure to blend with and supercharge the growing number of state-level zoning battles. If Biden is reelected, we are headed for a new political era in which formerly local decisions on zoning are transformed into first-rank federal and state conflicts. It’s already happening in Massachusetts, where the local-versus-state zoning clash is big news on a regular basis, and the governor and attorney general are fully entangled in the mess.
Most conservatives oppose AFFH as unwarranted federal overreach. … When it comes to zoning at the local and —crucially — the state level, however, conservatives and even libertarians are split. Some stick with the traditional federalist delegation of zoning decisions to the local level. Others reject even locally controlled zoning as unwarranted interference with market mechanisms and individual property rights. Given the current housing shortage and consequent rising prices, this has brought many libertarian and business-oriented conservatives into partnership with the sort of leftist housing activists who are actively hostile to America’s leafy, prosperous, single-family-zoned suburbs.
