Democrats push radical equity plan to transform suburbs into tenement cities

Recently, the City of Boise announced that it would spend nearly $2 million to continue using a hotel as a homeless shelter. Never mind that local shelters, like Boise Rescue Ministries, said they had the capacity and resources to assist with certain homeless demographic groups, including women and women with children. 

Boise Mayor Lauren McLean’s continued commitment to the failed policies pushed by her big city colleagues in Portland, Seattle and Los Angeles have garnered plenty of media attention. 

Less has been said about her radical plan to remake Boise into a high-density urban jungle. Like the planning experts who have remade San Francisco, Mayor McLean is using public monies to make local governments your landlord.

McLean’s radical city planners have deployed Orwellian-sounding “affordability incentives” to push President Obama’s radical “affirmatively furthering fair housing” regulations and turn quiet neighborhoods into streetscapes that will resemble the government-constructed and government-run “project” housing in places like Chicago and Detroit.

President Trump rescinded Obama’s housing regulations but the Biden Administration has brought them back, as they seek to make housing the centerpiece of their “equity” agenda. 

One of the tools Mayor McLean is using is something called “upzoning,” or where planners look to place multi-story or multi-unit dwellings in neighborhoods for single family homes. In layman’s terms, this means radical Democrats want to reconfigure existing zoning rules so that massive low-income apartment buildings can be built right next to your family home — destroying your property value.

Lots of readers will dismiss this as yet another example of the crazy LA-Portland-Seattle ideas taking hold among the wannabe liberal elites in Boise. But it’s much bigger than just Boise.

Affordable housing and the need to responsibly manage massive development is a central issue confronting our state. Liberals know this, and they want to capitalize on the costs and concerns facing so many of Idaho’s working people to implement their radical agenda to remake American life. Their end goal? Putting government bureaucrats — whether they’re urban planners or finance regulators or climate scientists — in charge of your home, your mortgage, your future. Ultimately, they want to make home ownership a thing of the past and instead see every American paying rent in a house or apartment owned by the big hedge funds like Black Rock. The Democrat’s housing agenda is being pushed all across the country—and all-around Idaho. Republican policymakers — in both state and local office — need to start thinking long and hard about the kinds of cities we will live in and pass on to future generations of Idaho’s hardworking men and women. Otherwise, Democrats — like Mayor McLean and her elite friends in LA and Portland — will have us living smashed head-to-toe in tenement towers with no conceivable way to ever own a home.