How Trump Is Using Westchester to Stir Up Suburban Fears

President Trump on Monday asserted that his Democratic rival, Joseph R. Biden Jr., wants to “destroy” the “American dream” by filling the suburbs with low-income housing projects.

The poster child for his bleak vision? Westchester County, N.Y., one of the wealthiest areas in the United States.

It was at least the third time in recent weeks that Mr. Trump had cited Westchester as a bellwether of his unfounded doomsday scenario that Democrats are bent on unleashing a torrent of violence and crime on America’s suburbs via housing policies meant to reduce segregation.

“Westchester was ground zero, OK, for what they were trying to do,” he said on Monday, in an interview on Fox News with Laura Ingraham, referring to Mr. Biden and his fellow Democrats. “They were trying to destroy the suburban, beautiful place. The American dream, really. They want low-income housing, and with that comes a lot of other problems, including crime.”

In an apparent, and continuing, bid to stoke racist fear among white voters, the president has focused on a rule that was adopted under President Barack Obama with the goal of erasing racial housing inequity in the suburbs. Mr. Trump scrapped the rule in July. Mr. Biden has vowed to revive it.

And while Westchester, a New York City suburb where Mr. Trump’s company owns property, has been a key battleground in the fight to desegregate suburbs, it’s not because of the Obama-era rule the president has fixated on, nor is there evidence for his dire vision of what it would bring.

What is the rule Mr. Trump said would “abolish the suburbs?”

Introduced in 2015, the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing regulation required local governments to identify patterns of racial segregation that are illegal under the Fair Housing Act of 1968 and to create detailed plans to correct them.

The rule, which strengthened a 1995 provision, said jurisdictions that received federal housing aid had to take “meaningful actions” to “overcome patterns of segregation and foster inclusive communities free from barriers that restrict access to opportunity based on protected characteristics.”

Such barriers often take the form of zoning laws that prohibit certain types of housing, a point of contention in desegregation fights in Westchester in the past.

The measure was intended to give local officials clearer guidance on how to provide fairer access to housing for those who had been denied such opportunities in the past, in part by creating stricter benchmarks for receiving the federal housing aid.

Fair-housing advocates hailed the rule, saying it would finally, after nearly five decades, put real muscle behind the 1968 law.

But compliance proved to be difficult.

How long did it take the Trump administration to target the measure?

Not long. Ben Carson, Mr. Trump’s pick for federal housing secretary, criticized the provision at his Senate confirmation hearings. After he was confirmed, the rule was effectively left in limbo.

In January 2018, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, or HUD, said it was suspending the rule for two years, telling local governments that were still working on their compliance plans that they need not submit them. The department also said it would stop reviewing plans that had already been filed.

Last January, HUD posted a notice saying it was considering weakening the rule to account for “the unique needs and difficulties faced by individual jurisdictions” in complying with a 92-item questionnaire that was required to obtain federal funds.

Then, on June 30, Mr. Trump took aim at the rule in a Twitter post, writing that “at the request of many great Americans” he was “studying it” because of what he said was its “a devastating impact” on “once thriving Suburban areas.”

“Not fair to homeowners,” he added. “I may END!”

By the end of the month, it was dead.

Where does Westchester County fit in?

“I’ve been watching this for years in Westchester, coming from New York,” Mr. Trump said at the White House in July, promising to end the rule. And there certainly have been high-profile fair-housing fights in the county just to the north of New York City.

The best-known may be the federal segregation case that Yonkers fought for 27 years, as documented in the book and HBO series, “Show Me a Hero.” The city nearly wound up bankrupt before finally capitulating in 2007.

A broader case emerged in 2006, when the Anti-Discrimination Center used a novel approach to sue Westchester for failing to adequately address the fair housing issue in its overwhelmingly white villages and towns as required under the 1995 rule, while still collecting millions of dollars a year in federal aid.

Three years later, a federal judge ruled that the county had indeed misrepresented its desegregation efforts.

The county and the federal government subsequently entered into a consent decree that, among other things, called for Westchester to build or acquire 750 homes or apartments — 630 of which were to go in towns and villages where Black residents made up no more than 3 percent of the population and Hispanic residents less than 7 percent.

A housing official in the Obama administration, which approved the agreement, described it as “historic” and said it would allow the federal government “to hold people’s feet to the fire.” Six years later, the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule was introduced.

The 750 homes were eventually built, but Craig Gurian, the Anti-Discrimination Center’s executive director, said many were in areas that did little to truly integrate largely white communities.

He also said that, despite local and county officials’ protests to the contrary, exclusionary zoning remained a significant problem in Westchester, and that enforcement of some of the consent decree’s provisions, including by the Obama administration, had been lacking.

“Sadly,” he said, “there is a tremendous amount of blame to go around here.”

Why is Mr. Trump focused on the fair-housing issue, and on Westchester specifically?

The Westchester part is fairly straightforward, even if the rule he is attacking and what he has been “watching for years” are not exactly related in the way he suggests. Since Mr. Trump is a New York native, what happens in the county was long a local story to him.

He and his company, the Trump Organization, also own property in the county, including Trump National Golf Club Westchester, in the town of Briarcliff Manor, and the Seven Springs estate, which traverses three towns, Bedford, New Castle and North Castle. (According to a 2016 court filing in the Anti-Discrimination Center case, Black people made up less than 3 percent of the population in the each of the four towns.)

There is also Mr. Trump’s own history with segregated housing. In 1973, at 27, he vehemently fought the federal government in a fair-housing lawsuit that accused his father’s rental developments in boroughs outside Manhattan of discriminating against Black applicants.

Mr. Trump’s opposition to the Obama-era housing rule echoes that of other Republicans, who view such regulations as federal overreach that strip local officials of control over their own communities.

And there is a political calculus at work. Nearly half of all voters live in a suburb, and in a New York Times/Siena poll in June, only 38 percent of suburban voters approved of Mr. Trump’s job performance.

Mr. Trump trailed Mr. Biden in the poll in suburban areas by 16 points, double his deficit against Hillary Clinton four years ago. (He lost Westchester by a 2-to-1 margin.)

The gap goes a good way toward explaining campaign ads that warn of anarchist mobs ransacking U.S. cities, comments that falsely portray Mr. Biden as a puppet of left-wing radicals and Mr. Trump’s warnings to the “Suburban Housewives of America” in places like Westchester.