Housing and Urban Development Secretary Dr. Ben Carson ripped the mainstream media for distorting "facts" about suburban demographics when it criticized President Donald Trump for reversing an Obama-era housing rule, according to Just the News.
In July, the Trump administration revoked a rule known as Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing that would allow HUD to remove single-family zoning. This would also satisfy racially-oriented requirements to build high-density, low-rent apartment buildings in suburban neighborhoods.
The administration said this form of “stack and pack” apartment housing would ruin the quality of life in the suburbs.
“I’ve grown to expect little in the way of analysis or truth from most of the media,” the laid-back Carson said. “So many of them said that our policy is racist, and we’re trying to keep suburbs white and silly stuff like that. You know, they don’t know the facts.”
Carson added, “They don’t know that 52 percent of African-Americans live in the suburbs, that 60 percent of Hispanics live in the suburbs, 62 percent of Asian-Americans live in the suburbs.”
“Today, the majority — 52 percent — of African Americans in the nation’s top 100 metro areas live in the suburbs of those regions … In 2000, the majority — 55 percent — of African Americans in the 100 largest metro areas lived in the big cities that anchor those regions,” Alana Semuels wrote in The Atlantic in October 2016.
According to a Pew Research Center 2018 post, “Urban and suburban counties are becoming more racially and ethnically diverse at a much faster pace than rural counties,” noting that since 2000, “the white population did not grow as sharply as other groups did, leading to a decline in the white share of the total U.S. and suburban populations.”
In July, Trump and Carson co-authored an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal defending the reversal.
“We reject the ultraliberal view that the federal bureaucracy should dictate where and how people live. We believe the suburbs offer a wonderful life for Americans of all races and backgrounds when they are allowed to grow organically, from the bottom up,” Trump and Carson wrote.
© 2024 Newsmax. All rights reserved.