You’ve read about how some towns are members of Smart Growth America, an NGO that is pushing regionalism, urbanism, trains, and compact housing among other things.
Be aware that your town may be seeking training from these folks in the way of free annual workshops.
Read about it here:
http://www.smartgrowthamerica.org/technical-assistance/free-annual-workshops
Editor’s note: We are not here to sell things but we feel this DVD could be a very good informational tool to be used at local meetings and gatherings to help people better understand why regionalism, HUD, and other federal agencies are so dangerous to local control.
See how to purchase the DVD from Sustainable Freedom Lab at the end of the article.
Our federal government is dismantling personal property rights in the largest attack on local rule in our nation’s history.
By accusing communities of discrimination and civil rights violations, HUD has ignored Congress and used the Fair Housing Act to grant themselves the authority to control local planning and land use.
HUD’s rule, Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) forces communities that accept HUD grants to comply with aggressive federal planning schemes or face bankrupting government-contrived lawsuits.
Our newest DVD, “No Choice – How HUD Controls your Property Rights” blows the lid off HUD’s actions in clear terms all community members can understand.
People do not see the gradual property confiscation because local officials want the grant money and people trust HUD’s goals of helping the poor and ending discrimination.
But, communities can no longer afford to surrender their property rights and choices in exchange for federal agencies “granting” back the money that was always theirs.
People need to understand that government is not helping their communities. These grants are strip away community rights for the sole purpose of adding to federal power over our towns, counties and states. That is why I created this DVD.
SFL’s new DVD, “No Choice” exposes all of HUD’s tactics. The video is broken into 10 chapters to make it easy to access and share information.
Chapter 1: Property Rights Matter – If government can control your property, it can control your behavior. This chapter shows the frightening power the federal government can exercise in anyone’s life when it controls your property.
Chapter 2: Fair Housing Act and AFFH – Explains why and how this administration contorted federal law to grant themselves power over local land use and even overturn voter’s decisions.
Chapter 3: HUD’s New Legal Force – The video details the landmark legal case that gave birth to HUD’s AFFH power grab and the man who makes millions of dollars suing local communities. When people see this chapter, they get steaming mad.
Chapter 4: Creating Your Own Liability – HUD enforces their AFFH rule by encouraging grassroots civil rights organizations to sue their own communities for supposed barriers to fair housing. See how HUD’s actions tear communities apart and pit neighbor against neighbor.
Chapter 5: Regional Annexation – Regions appoint unelected councils that take choices away from voters and divest authority from local public officials. Regions are also easier for the federal government to manage. Learn how HUD’s new rule forces smaller communities to join regions whether they want to or not.
Chapter 6: The Binding “Obligation” –Every community that applies for HUD’s most popular grants must sign a single statement that can lead to a devastating False Claims Act lawsuit. To avoid lawsuits, counties and towns are crumbling to meet HUD’s demands. This chapter shows how legal experts interpret the wording.
Chapter 7: HUD Gets Tough – HUD is issuing compliance reviews, threatening to withhold grant money, engaging in False Claims Act lawsuits, disparate impact suits and taking record numbers of actions against communities. This chapter outlines some of the cases. You will want to share this with your public officials.
Chapter 8: More than Affordable Housing – Everyone in America should watch this single chapter. HUD is no longer merely about affordable housing. The agency has already said their new rule is just a platform for advancing a suitcase full of costly programs in communities. Learn about “upward mobility”, “socioeconomic diversity”, “Regional Equity Assistance Centers”, “behavioral messaging” and more programs that threaten to remake your community. HUD has even partnered with the departments of Education and Transportation to redesign entire communities. If your town refuses to comply, local officials can expect the grant funds to be withdrawn or to face charges of civil rights violations, or failure to affirmatively further fair housing and more.
Chapter 9: How to Stop AFFH – The 2nd circuit Federal court explains how to avoid the increased liability from HUD grants.
Chapter 10: Resources – We can stop HUD and the federal government from centrally planning our communities. This chapter outlines more tools and programs to help you learn about and end government overreach.
Yet another ‘non-binding international agreement’. The New Urban Agenda will be adopted this October and will shape city development for the next 20 years. ⁃ TN Editor
The agenda is a non-binding international agreement designed to shape urban development over the next two decades. It will be formally adopted at the UN Habitat IIIsummit in Quito, Ecuador, from October 17-20, 2016.
Read about Agenda 2030 to understand what is behind ‘regionalism’ and the push by the federal government to hand out grants so towns an cities can start complying.
Read more: The New Urban Agenda Heads To Habitat III
In a bold move, HUD partnered with the Departments of Transportation and Education to create a massive alteration in the way children experience school. The program is designed to help low-income families grow financially. Instead, it accomplishes something much different.
HUD Moves to Dictate Classroom Diversity
by John Anthony, Sustainable Freedom Lab
HUD is the ‘gold’ standard of dangerously unchecked bureaucracies. “Dangerously” because the agency’s zealous moves already threaten property owners’ choices and undermine the authority of local public officials.
Now HUD wants to move that control into the classroom.
In a joint meeting with members from the Departments of Education and Transportation, HUD presented their plan to embed socio-economic diversity in America’s schoolrooms.
Based on controversial reports, often using HUD provided data; the agency concludes that people living in wealthier areas have a better chance for success. Therefore, they reason, to create upward mobility for voucher recipients, HUD must relocate them into affluent neighborhoods and schools.
The agency is pulling three federal departments together to micro-manage the racial, ethnic and economic mix of students in America’s elementary and secondary classrooms.
“Diversity benefits all students in our schools,” said U.S. Secretary of Education John B. King Jr., one of the leaders of the administration’s program. “Students who attend diverse schools will be better prepared to live and work, and be active citizens in today’s world.”
Unfortunately, Sec. King has little idea of what it takes to prepare students. In 2014, he was forced to resign as New York State Commissioner of Education, partially for blaming the failures of his Common Core implementation on “ignorant” children.
Kings performance was so abysmal; New York’s largest teachers union unanimously approved a vote of “no confidence” in his policies. That “failure” is now the US Secretary of Education.
As Jessica McNair, an Oneida County, NY educator commented, “Congress [must] take power out of the hands of the Department of Education. Otherwise, John King will continue to wreak damage on our public school children and their schools.”
McNair’s remarks were prescient.
Rather than promote education, King wants to transplant HUD recipients into more upscale “areas of opportunity.”
Under the Obama administration’s progressive educational approach, local control of education is a dinosaur. Reading, writing and arithmetic are incidental. Diversity is their new key to prosperity.
HUD proposes the development of regional Equity Assistance Centers to provide technical assistance to school districts to increase socioeconomic diversity and desegregate their schools.
For Obama, this is another step toward reducing what he calls, America’s “legacy of housing discrimination and segregation.”
HUD fuels its new classroom diversity with its Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule. Under AFFH, HUD ignored Congress’ constraints in the Fair Housing Act. The agency granted itself authority over housing, education, transportation and now, “socioeconomic diversity.”
The administration contends their plans are too important to be confined to any “one jurisdiction’s borders” and promotes regional solutions to accomplish its goals. HUD wants state and local educational agencies to select new sites for schools, have boundary-free open enrollment and establish more charter schools.
The Secretary wants to create better land use and planning strategies. Working in tandem, HUD, ED and DOT encourage communities to align public transportation routes, sidewalk construction, and related bus stops with schools and housing facilities. HUD wants complete streets, mass transportation, and a community participation process.
If this sounds like a backdoor to regional sustainable development, rather than economic mobility, you are right. The Department of Education even blames the urban planner’s archenemy, ‘urban sprawl,’ for decreased economic opportunities. Suddenly the replacement of local governments with unaccountable regional councils is for “the children.”
For now, HUD’s socioeconomic diversity program is voluntary. But with millions of dollars in planning and training of staff to operate Equity Assistance Centers, it will soon be more than a voluntary option.
As explained in the report, Agency Tyranny, HUD’s AFFH rule obligates grant recipients to affirmatively further fair housing for all projects involving fair housing and urban development. If that strategy fails to convince hesitant communities to comply, there is always the threat of a disparate impact suit.
Shifting voucher recipients from one classroom to another does little to provide the drive, experience and emotional maturity necessary for success. It does even less to create good-paying jobs.
HUD is exploiting parents’ desires to help their children, as cover to replace local government with regional authorities using the legal muscle of AFFH.
It is time to recognize that incompetent bureaucrats and out of control federal agencies are the real enemies of economic mobility.
We’ve warned about the VMT (vehicle miles traveled) tax before, and there are people considering it. Link to I-95 Corridor Coalition added.
NH shouldn’t tax our odometers
By Rep. RICK LADD
NEW HAMPSHIRE’S STATE GAS TAX is currently set at 22.2 cents per gallon. This price is slightly less than the 24 cents per gallon paid in Massachusetts and much less than the 30 cents per gallon paid in Maine. With the exception of the 4.2 cents per gallon increase in 2014, New Hampshire’s tax on gasoline has remained relatively flat over the years.
The Department of Transportation, along with a number of departments and agencies, rely upon this source of revenue in order to support daily operations; however, with the increasing numbers of fuel efficient and electric vehicles, the department’s operating revenue has decreased.
Some vehicles are simply traveling farther on the same amount of gas; therefore, less gas is being used. This is a win for the consumer and environment, but decreasing revenue is counter-productive to highway and bridge maintenance.
In an effort to remedy the revenue issue, there appears to be an effort by several states to pursue a study of a mileage-based tax. Rather than being taxed for gas used, drivers would be taxed on miles driven. The mileage-based tax concept presents a whole host of bothersome issues such as financial hardship to those dependent upon high volume highway use and for all, privacy issues regarding how the government would collect and track data.
Accordingly, it is somewhat shocking to learn that a federal grant application was submitted by the Delaware DOT on behalf of the I-95 Corridor Coalition, a consortium of 16 states. It proposes pilot programs in five states — Connecticut, Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire and another yet to be determined — designed to learn more about mileage-based user fees, and to evaluate implementation alternatives.
The total cost of the grant program is $2.98 million, of which $1.49 million comes from the federal government, with the remainder coming from individual states with matching funds. Connecticut has committed $300,000, Delaware and Pennsylvania would each pay $290,000 in cash, and Vermont would contribute $30,000 for planning and analysis. Instead of cash, the pilot program application reflects New Hampshire’s match share in the amount of $580,000 in toll credits.
Can New Hampshire afford to redirect more than a half-million dollars of toll credits needed for road maintenance and red-listed bridges in order to support a fee-per-mile taxation study?
The state budget-making process is built upon prioritizing needs and doing so through an open, transparent process involving public input. Redirecting toll revenue midstream during a budget cycle is contrary to that process and invites needed legislative oversight.
Mileage-based taxation generates a number of serious issues, of which protection of personal information and data is foremost. How is Big Brother going to obtain data identifying miles driven, and will this information remain protected and confidential?
If a scheme such as this does move forward, how will the state ascertain taxable miles driven in New Hampshire versus miles driven in another state or country? If mileage-based taxation becomes reality, how will North Country residents be impacted where traveling longer distances is required for work or other daily needs?
And, if a fee-per-mile study becomes reality in New Hampshire, how would this taxation scheme apply to vacationers from out-of-state?
Learning about the I-95 Coalition fee-per-mile study application and of New Hampshire’s decision to pilot the program with $580,000 from state toll credits is unsettling to this member of the Legislature.
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Rep. Rick Ladd, R-Haverhill, is in his fourth term in the New Hampshire House.
A land use dispute on Henniker’s Mount Hunger Road continues, and both sides are calling in attorneys.
Stephen Forster, a Christmas tree farmer who hosts weddings on his 110-acre farm, is planning to take the town back to court after the zoning board decided the planning board erred in granting Forster a conditional use permit.
Forster, through his attorneys at BCM Environmental and Land Law, filed the motion for rehearing right before the deadline of July 15, which was 30 days after the decision was made.
The zoning board, which is not scheduled to meet until Aug. 17, has 30 days from the date of the filing to hold a public meeting, where members will review the submission and decide if there is new evidence to constitute a rehearing.
Forster says the zoning board was “unreasonable and unlawful, and totally negated the article the legislative body voted in.”
Here is an invitation to a presentation on Complete Streets movement, a which was inspired by the US’s goal to effectively enforce the UN’s MDGs and SDGs.
If you live in this area, you are certainly going to want to attend this breakfast.
Please note at the bottom, the numerous NON-governmental groups that are promoting this, who represent the various aspects of your lives that the government hopes to control. Too fat? Complete Streets will encourage you to walk. Don’t want to use gas or oil? They expect you’ll walk or bike. Want housing? They would love it if you chose a compact apartment in the city… even if the area is NOT citified.
“Low taxes” are a hook, but in most cases these boondoggle projects cost the taxpayers dearly in unused transportation systems and other features. 25-34 year olds are in fact, wanting to leave the cities where they attended college and strike out on a plot of land of their own, as is the American Dream.
From the Lakes Region Planning Commission:
What are Complete Streets?
How can they benefit our communities?
The Lakes Region enjoys a strong base of diverse industries, civic engagement, and a high quality of life. Creativity, efficiency, and adaptability are hallmarks of both private and public enterprise in the region.
And yet:
The population age 65+ in this region will rise from 15% to 34% by 2030. Seniors want to live where they can still be active even after they give up driving.
Major employers increasingly tend to locate in communities where their executives want to live: ones that invest in their downtowns, and in recreation, schools, and safety. Low taxes are part of the picture, but far from all of it.
25 to 34 year-olds with a college degree are increasingly moving to places where they don’t have to drive to get to work and entertainment.
People are looking for opportunities to live more active lifestyles, as decreased physical activity has been linked to type 2 diabetes, cancer, stroke, hypertension, cardiovascular disease, and premature mortality.
The annual medical costs for obesity in New Hampshire are estimated at $302 million.
How do we address these needs? How do we make our streets more inviting and accessible to everyone, whether they arrive in a vehicle, on foot, on a bicycle, or by other means, regardless of age or ability?
On Friday, July 29th, come find out why 663 communities across the nation, and five in New Hampshire, have adopted Complete Streets to increase economic vitality, safety, and public health. We’ll gather at 9:00 am at the City Hall in Laconia for a light breakfast and a brief presentation with questions, then go outside to see real life examples. We’ll lead one group on foot and on the bus, or you can join the second group on your own bicycle for a short ride, coming back inside to enjoy some refreshments and compare notes. Wear comfortable shoes and bring a raincoat, just in case!
This event is brought to you by the Bike-Walk Alliance of NH, TTransport NH and HEAL NH in partnership with Lakes Region Planning Commission.
For more information, contact Rebecca Harris, RLHarris@TransportNH.org
America’s homeowners should be shaking in their shoes. The federal government has decided that people who have worked, saved and planned so they can buy homes in nice, safe neighborhoods of their own choosing, are racists. They charge that it is a “social injustice.” The government now claims that it’s unfair unless everyone can have the same, whether they earn it or not. And it doesn’t matter whether they can afford such a home. We’re told that it’s racist to deny someone an equal home, just because they don’t have the money for it. White privilege, don’t you know.
Related Links
“A World Government Constitution Under The UN Already Exists – The US Is Involved Up To Our Eyeballs”
How Sustainable Development Goals are Being Met
Michigan Loses ‘Right To Farm’ This Week: A Farewell To Backyard Chickens and Beekeepers
Michigan residents lost their “right to farm” this week thanks to a new ruling by the Michigan Commission of Agriculture and Rural Development. Gail Philburn of the Michigan Sierra Club told Michigan Live, the news changes “effectively remove Right to Farm Act protection for many urban and suburban backyard farmers raising small numbers of animals.”
Backyard and urban farming were previously protected by Michigan’s Right to Farm Act. The Commission ruled that the Right to Farm Act protections no longer apply to many homeowners who keep small numbers of livestock.
And who knew the WHO would be involved? Once again, those surveys you think are innocent are feeding the data to the international government about who is doing what when it’s none of their business.
The ruling comes within days of a report by The World Health Organization that stated the world is currently in grave danger of entering a post-antibiotic era. The WHO’s director-general Dr. Margaret Chan argued that the antibiotic use in our industrialized food supply is the worst offender adding to the global crisis.
Public officials across the nation are discovering that HUD’s new Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule jeopardizes local zoning control.
HUD is scrambling to deny this with befuddling information.
– The Federal Register says, “[AFFH] does not impose any land use or zoning laws on any government.”
– A recent article in Urbanland, the magazine of the Urban Land Institute, defends AFFH. Its author quotes HUD’s Gustavo Velasquez…
“…opponents of AFFH “keep making this zoning argument that AFFH is about rezoning or imposing zoning provisions on local jurisdictions,”
– HUD contends they leave planning and zoning to local communities. AFFH is merely a “planned framework” that provides “nationwide uniformity and consistency for fair housing.”
In spite of this absurdly contradictory statement, many local officials, hesitant to forego HUD grants, find the lines tempting.
How can HUD deny they control local zoning when the evidence proves the opposite?
Easy. At first glance, the Federal Register appears definitive. The “agency does not impose any land use or zoning laws…” But, that all changes later in the ruling…
“It is important to note, however, that while zoning and land use are generally local matters, when local zoning or land use practices violate the Fair Housing Act, they become a Federal concern…” Federal Register July 16, 2015
The ‘catch’ for communities is that HUD places no clear limits on what constitutes violations of the Fair Housing Act.
Today a fair housing violation can be anything from a “concentrated area of poverty” to refusal to “economically integrate” upscale neighborhoods, regardless of the number of affordable homes built.
Even HUD’s definitions of “discrimination” and “exclusionary zoning” are moving targets as we learned from Westchester County.
The New York community has become the on-going incubator for HUD’s anti-local zoning campaign. Initially, HUD tried and failed to prove the jurisdiction guilty of discrimination.
Undeterred, they then accused the county of “restrictive zoning” practices. But, two independent legal studies showed otherwise. Westchester based their zoning on safety and constructed homes by virtue of economics, not people. Anyone can buy a home anywhere in the county as long as they can afford the payments. In fact, studies proved the county one of the most diversified in the state.
When that failed, HUD re-defined “restrictive zoning” to include economic considerations. This time they successfully argued the county failed to “economically integrate” their towns. As Stanley Kurtz proves in a recent article, economic integration has no legal basis in the Fair Housing Act.
That did not stop HUD. “Economic integration,” a policy that forces communities to build affordable housing in affluent areas or face discrimination charges, is now fundamental to HUD’s “planned framework” of uniformity and consistency.
In Velasquez’ words, opposition to AFFH is based on a…
“misconstrued, misguided argument that is not really what the rule is attempting to do.”
Yet agency letters to Westchester show that HUD can consider “size of lots, size of a development and the number of bedrooms” restrictive zoning practices
There is no “misconstruing” what HUD has already done to zoning in communities like Westchester County, NY and Marin County, CA. Local zoning control may not be what the agency “is attempting to do,” but it is precisely what it accomplishes.
Here is how the agency controls local zoning:
– First, HUD requires each applicant for CDBG and other grants, to complete an Assessment of Fair Housing, to identify all “contributing factors” to discrimination.
– Next, the applicant submits a plan to HUD detailing how they will eliminate the “contributing factors” and foster integrated, balanced lifestyles.
– Then, HUD can accept the plan, ask for modifications or reject it. If accepted, the jurisdiction receives funding and begins plan implementation.
This sounds straightforward. But, there is a ‘catch.’
– AFFH requires that civil rights groups, affordable housing developers and/or other civic activist organizations participate in creating the plan that defines and resolves potential areas of discrimination.
– The applicant also signs an agreement to take no actions “materially inconsistent with its obligation to affirmatively further fair housing.”
If the community receives the grant money and decides to ignore one potential area of discrimination because of current zoning restrictions or voters’ choices, and instead focus on another, they are now vulnerable to lawsuits for failure meet their obligation to AFFH.
So, while HUD does not directly control local zoning, acceptance of the grant money obligates local officials to take whatever actions are necessary to meet HUD’s demands, including ignoring or changing their own zoning laws.
– Once accepting the money, any one of these activist groups can sue the community for failure to affirmatively further fair housing. When the Westchester case settled, a 2-person civil rights group that sued received $7.5 million.
In other words, there is a perverse financial incentive for citizens to sue local communities that do not, where necessary, modify zoning and land use to accommodate HUD’s erratic and continually expanding definitions of discrimination, segregation and Fair Housing.
As Michael Allen of the law firm of Relman, Dane and Colfax, one of the nation’s leading experts on AFFH explains, “it [AFFH] does provide a foundation on which civil rights advocates can build anti-segregation campaigns at the local level.” He goes on to say this will require “organizing by the national fair housing advocacy organizations…; and lawyers prepared to bring enforcement actions.” This trigger of lawsuits is the key that makes AFFH work.
Until the Westchester case, HUD had no efficient method to enforce their regulations nationwide. Now that they do, the agency is increasing their demands on communities well beyond any obligations set forth in the Fair Housing Act.
If you accept HUD grants, and fail to obey the agency, no matter how extreme their demands may be, your community is exposed to withdrawal of the grant funds or massive lawsuits. That is how HUD controls local zoning.
The above information courtesy of John Anthony, Founder of Property Value Defense