Donald Trump is losing the suburbs, but he has a plan and wants “Suburban Housewives” to know it. The plan will be familiar to urbanists: stoking fears of single-family zoning reform and low-income housing and brazenly claiming opponents want to “abolish the suburbs.” Eerie isn’t it–am I reading a Seattle Times column?
Packaging sexism, classism, and screaming racist dogwhistles together is hardly a new formula for the president, but squarely targeting suburban voters with all the subtlety of an atomic bomb is novel.
Urbanists have long argued that widespread single-family zoning is a racist artifact that drives up housing costs and furthers segregation. Reform that zoning and it allow more affordable housing, more seniors to age in place, higher transit frequencies, and lower climate emissions. Much to our chagrin, suburban cities and neighborhoods continue to be overwhelmingly dominated by single-family zoning in the Seattle region and across much of the county. Still, that message is slowly making inroads.
In a tele-town hall earlier this month, Trump said that Democrats want to “eliminate single-family zoning, bringing who knows into your suburbs, so your communities will be unsafe and your housing values will go down.” Even more melodramatically, he claimed former Vice President Joe Biden wants to “abolish the suburbs.”
Biden painted those accusations as smears. Biden’s housing plan does identify exclusionary zoning as a problem and sets aside $65 billion in low-income housing funding for jurisdictions “willing to implement zoning laws that encourage more affordable housing.” However, this incremental incentives-driven approach hardly qualifies as the wholesale top-down elimination Trump portrayed.
