Local communities in Florida are opposing President Joe Biden’s reconciliation infrastructure package, which attempts to “destroy” the suburbs by replacing local zoning laws with federal laws, allowing high-rise, low-income housing next to a single family homes.
The Property Appraiser of Lake County, Florida, and former Republican State Senator Carey Baker told Breitbart News, “This is just another example of the heavy handed federal government attempting to tell local communities what’s best for them.”
“Local people know how to take care of those in need on their own,” Baker stated. “Local communities know what will work and won’t work, and for the federal government to come in a destroy neighborhoods to meet some ideological goal is just wrong.”
Anthony Sabatini, candidate for U.S. Congress and current Florida State Representative, who served on the Eustis City Commission, also told Breitbart News the “federal government needs to stay the hell away from telling local governments what to do.”
“If new federal laws override local zoning laws, our suburbs will turn into the cities the Democrats have been ruining for 20 years… full of crime and poor education,” he said.
A local landlord and mortgage lender from Tavares, Florida, Casey Gates, explained to Breitbart News that if “we allow our [federal] government to override” local zoning laws “and mandate free placement of these low income housing projects, it is my fear that the criminal and degenerate environment surrounding these projects will spread across our great country.”
Gates said he is also concerned the legislation will be “threatening to the peace and safety of our homes that the majority of us here in America have worked so hard to build and enjoy.”
“Our country does not need more Portlands or Fergusons. I say let the leftist regime stay in the ruinous and burning bed that is has made for itself,” Gates concluded.
Indeed, Biden’s reconciliation package plans to devise the destruction of the suburbs via a measure within the package called the “HOMES Act,” which will put the federal government in charge of local zoning laws to change local demographics, impacting the already purple voting districts.
According to the measure, any local government which does not kneel to the federal zoning guidelines, meaning “ordinances that ban apartment buildings from certain residential areas or set a minimum lot size for a single family home,” the Department of House and Urban Development (HUD) will cut off funding to that city which the city uses to maintain the its current low-income housing.
The legislation also poses an additional consequence for cities keeping their local zoning laws in place by punishing states by blocking the entities from “receiving taxpayer funded transportation grants of any kind if they refuse to allow high-rise apartments throughout their high density zoning in their suburbs.”
States rely on federal transportation funding to fix local streets and highways.
Housing and Urban Development Secretary Marcia Fudge told USA Today in April, “The result of this sort of investment will be critical to increasing housing options for low- and moderate-income families.”
Former President Donald Trump stated during a 2020 campaign rally that Biden wants “to put low-cost housing in the suburbs, and that would mean abolishing, ruining the suburbs. It has already begun. It’s been going on for years.”
Biden refuted his assertion at the time by saying Trump is “trying to scare because an awful lot of suburbanites are now deciding they’re going to vote for me, at least the data suggests, as opposed to him.”
The infrastructure package is currently being negotiated among members of congress which far-left Democrats and President Joe Biden want to pass via reconciliation, a tactic which would not have to surpass to Republican filibuster.
The reconciliation package is rumored to be anywhere from $4 trillion to $10 trillion, nearly three times more than the United States’ projected 2021 revenues, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO).