The HUD Secretary of the Obama Administration announced a government rule that will affect your family and community in ways you might not have imagined. Stanley Kurtz says that this is one of the most radical initiatives from this administration and has transformative potential. It gives the federal government power to impose “preferred racial and ethnic composition, densifying housing, transportation, and business development” in the suburbs and cities.

Stanley Kurtz wrote about this issue many years ago in his book, Spreading the Wealth: How Obama is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities. He was on my radio program back then to talk about it, but now it has become a reality. Imagine if the government demanded your neighborhood to be a certain percentage of racial or economic mix. It could make that happen with these new HUD rules. Imagine the government wanted a higher density of people living in your community because a bureaucrat thought you had too many single-family dwellings.

These HUD rules take away the power of a local community. A city official or a county official would no longer have the power they currently enjoy. Stanley Kurtz says that these rules would replace them with a “regional alternative that turns suburbs into helpless satellites of large cities.”

You might respond that your local government would never allow this to happen. Stanley Kurtz argues: “Once HUD gets it hooks into a municipality, no policy area is safe. Zoning, transportation, education, all of it risks slipping in the control of the federal government and the new, unelected regional bodies the feds will empower.” How do they get their hooks in you? Take one dollar of HUD money, and the local government now comes under the control of these bureaucrats.

You might be asking: Why haven’t I heard about this? There have been some stories, but I think the administration wants to keep most of it quiet. A recent Rasmussen poll found that 83 percent of respondents disagreed with the idea that it was the government’s job to “diversity neighborhoods by income level.” This is not a popular policy, that that’s probably why you are just now hearing about it.