"Local zoning ... will disappear."

Regionalism, a government structure never authorized by the constitution, has been gaining immense power nationwide as these entities become the recipients of federal money for their own planning purposes, as well grantors for deserving cities and counties within their boundaries.  If a city were to reject the policies of the regional government, it would run the risk of losing federal funds.  Along with every "gift" comes an obligation to conform to someone else's rules.  But will other regulatory means be used to do some serious suburb-busting?  How far will the federal government  agencies go in transforming America?

(Minneapolis) Star Tribune  

An activist Met Council is mixed up on poverty

• Article by: KATHERINE KERSTEN 
• Updated: November 16, 2013 - 4:21 PM

It’s going to upend the American dream with its activist housing policies.

Excerpts:
The [Metropolitan] Council was founded in the 1960s to oversee efficient regional use of sewers and roads. But under Gov. Mark Dayton, it is taking on a grandiose social mission. It plans to use “Thrive MSP 2040” — its 30-year development plan for the seven-county region, due out in early 2014 — to remake neighborhoods and impose planners’ vision of the ideal mix of race, ethnicity and income on every municipality.

It laid the foundation with its “Fair Housing and Equity Assessment,” a draft of which was released in June and which analyzed every census tract in the metro area to identify “Racially Concentrated Areas of Poverty” and “Opportunity Clusters.” High-opportunity areas are essentially those with high-performing schools and low crime rates.

Using these data, the council will lay out what the region’s 187 municipalities must do to disperse poverty.

As yet, the council has provided few details. But the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development — the source of the $5 million planning grant the council used to fund its racial mapping — has made the project’s transformational nature clear. According to HUD, the mapping is intended to identify suburban land use and zoning practices that allegedly deny opportunity and create “barriers” for low-income and minority people. Regional plans, declares HUD, must ensure that suburbs change those practices to meet ratios consistent with racial and income quotas.

For HUD, it’s “not about 750 units,” Westchester County Executive Rob Astorino has said, “it’s about changing the world.”

“If HUD can define what constitutes exclusionary practices, then local zoning as it is known today disappears,” he wrote in the Wall Street Journal. “Apartments, high rises or whatever else the federal government or a developer wants can be built on any block in America.”

Here in Minnesota, we can expect the Met Council’s housing and transit plans to reinforce its crusade to compel “economic integration.” Its “Transit-Oriented Development Strategic Action Plan,” released in June, strongly suggests that cities that want transportation money will have to meet “social equity” goals, including low-income housing and likely the zoning and other land-use regulation changes required to accommodate it.