Dr. Ben Carson As HUD Secretary Could Mean the End of This Policy

President-elect Donald Trump has hit the ground running with selecting members of his cabinet. Conservatives applauded his choice of Sen. Jeff Sessions, who has a strong record on advocating immigration enforcement, as U.S. Attorney General.

Some are less enthusiastic about Mitt Romney as Secretary of State. Romney was a vocal opponent of Trump’s during the GOP primary.

Trump is considering Dr. Ben Carson as his Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) secretary. Will Dr. Carson accept? From the Wall Street Journal:

On Wednesday, Mr. Carson suggested on Facebook that he would join the Trump administration, reversing his stance last week that he didn’t want to work in government.

“After serious discussions with the Trump transition team, I feel that I can make a significant contribution particularly to making our inner cities great for everyone,” Mr. Carson said. “An announcement is forthcoming about my role in helping to make America great again.”

But several hours after the Facebook post was written, Carson spokesman Armstrong Williams said Mr. Carson was still considering the HUD opportunity and that no decision had been made.

Liberals will complain about all of Trump’s choices, and Dr. Carson is no exception.

The retired neurosurgeon criticized the departing Obama administration’s so-called anti-discrimination housing policy that he compared to the unpopular busing policy that forced parents to send their children to schools outside their neighborhoods to achieve racial balance — a social engineering experiment that didn’t end segregation. People don’t like being guinea pigs.

From Dr. Carson’s article:

It is true that the Fair Housing Act and other laws have greatly reduced explicit discrimination in housing, but significant disparities in housing availability and quality persist. To address them, The Obama administration’s new agency rules rely on a tortured reading of the Fair Housing laws to empower the Department of Housing and Urban Development to “affirmatively promote” fair housing, even in the absence of explicit discrimination.

The new rule would not only condition the grant of HUD funds to municipalities on building affordable housing as is the case today, but would require that such affordable housing be built primarily in wealthier neighborhoods with few current minority residents and that the new housing be aggressively marketed to minorities. In practice, the rule would fundamentally change the nature of some communities from primarily single-family to largely apartment-based areas by encouraging municipalities to strike down housing ordinances that have no overtly (or even intended) discriminatory purpose — including race-neutral zoning restrictions on lot sizes and limits on multi-unit dwellings, all in the name of promoting diversity.

Photo credit: By Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America – Ben Carson, CC BY-SA 2.0, Link