• There are a little over 100 days left in the presidential campaign and President Trump is trying to lock down the suburban vote by saying Joe Biden wants to “abolish” suburbia.
  • The statement comes as Trump is rolling back an Obama-era fair housing policy that continued decades of desegregation policy, which Biden’s campaign understandably supports.
  • The housing policy was meant to further racial equality by cracking down on practices like redlining, which prevented Black Americans from buying houses in suburban areas for decades.
  • Biden’s housing plan actually intends to add more infrastructure to suburbs and increase affordable housing supply across the country.
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Depending on who you’re listening to, you might have heard that Joe Biden has big, bad plans for America’s suburbs.

His opponent this coming November, Donald Trump, began saying various disparaging and false things about Biden’s suburban agenda in mid-July.

“Suburbia will be no longer as we know it,” Trump said at a White House event in which he also said Biden wants to “abolish” the suburbs.

A night later, The Washington Post’s Dave Weigel reported, Trump said in a “tele-town hall” that Democrats want to eliminate single-family zoning, which would bring “who knows into your suburbs, so your communities will be unsafe and your housing values will go down.”

Stanley Kurtz in the conservative National Review wrote a column around the same time, asking, "Will Biden's War on the Suburbs Become a Campaign Issue?"

This would be really bad news for the many homebuyers who, as Business Insider has previously reported, are flooding into suburban areas, bringing bidding wars and all-cash offers with them.

So is it true?

It's not, unless you think initiatives geared toward racial equality would "abolish" the suburbs. In the US of 2020, following months of the coronavirus pandemic and George Floyd protests, that may remain an open question.

Biden supported 'fair housing' initiatives as Obama's vice president, so it's no surprise he still does

As vice president for eight years under President Barack Obama, Biden signed onto a series of initiatives that fell under "fair housing" reforms dating back to the 1968 passage of the Fair Housing Act.

As Business Insider's Libertina Brandt previously reported, decades of federal housing policy since the 1930s had explicitly discriminated against Black homebuyers. It was difficult for Black Americans to secure mortgages due to "redlining," or the practice of "denying credit to residents of predominantly minority neighborhoods," according to the Dept. of Housing and Urban Development.

As a result, Black Americans largely missed out on the postwar suburban boom in which a largely white middle class built generational wealth on the back of rising home values. The real estate industry continues to reckon with its racist legacy today, as reported by Business Insider's Natasha Solo-Lyons.

The 1970s-era reforms that followed the Fair Housing Act were meant to mitigate the resulting racial wealth gap - and Obama-Biden housing policies were geared toward continuing that work, so it's no surprise Biden would be reviving them in his agenda as a presidential candidate.

Biden's platform intends to pour $640 billion into affordable housing over 10 years and to continue cracking down on redlining, along with "increasing the supply and lowering the cost" of homes.

Diane Yentel, the president and CEO of the National Low Housing Coalition, told NPR that Obama-era policy aimed for rezoning in some communities, as some zoning had led to "purposeful, policy-driven segregation." Biden's plan similarly endorses that.

A key plank of the Obama-Biden policy was a rule put in place in 2015, related to enforcement of the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing provision. The Dept. of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) website used to say that it was designed to aid the effort to "overcome historic patterns of segregation, promote fair housing choice, and foster inclusive communities that are free from discrimination."

The HUD website no longer says that because the Trump White House rolled back the rule this week. Trump took to Twitter to say that the rule has a "devastating impact" on "once thriving suburban areas." He continued: "Corrupt Joe Biden wants to make [suburbs] MUCH WORSE."

Fair housing groups have criticized this rollback as well as Trump's racial rhetoric on the subject of suburbs.

Vox's Matthew Yglesias analyzed Biden's "surprisingly visionary" housing plan in July, citing a Columbia University model. He found that it would cut "cut child poverty by a third, narrow racial opportunity gaps, and potentially drive progress on the broader middle-class affordability crisis in the largest coastal cities."

Yglesias also noted that "affluent inner-ring suburbs of big coastal cities" presumably don't want to change their zoning rules, since they are "many of the most exclusionary places in America." He also noted that exactly this type of suburb is increasingly tending to vote Democratic.