On July 29 of this year, President Trump announced on Twitter that he had “rescinded the Obama-Biden AFFH Rule,” a reference to the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule, which was passed by the Obama Administration in 2015.
With that, the issue of housing in American suburbs became an issue in the 2020 presidential campaign. Although the suburbs of today bear little resemblance to their cookie-cutter predecessors like Levittown, Long Island, they are still, in important ways, resistant to diversity and change.
To explore why that is, and how it happened in the first place, we sat down with Roger Panetta Ph.D., a recently retired professor of history and the author of Westchester: The American Suburb, (Fordham University Press, 2006) and The Tappan Zee Bridge and the Forging of the Rockland Suburb. The Historical Society of Rockland County, 2010). He also co-wrote Kingston: The IBM Years, (Black Dome Press, 2014).