In the 51 years since I left my mother’s house, I have lived in apartments, rented single family homes, an owned half-duplex, an owned single family home, and now, finally, an owned farmhouse on actual farmland. We have exactly one neighboring home, about 100 yards away, as our houses are the only two on a country road down which the Post Office will not deliver, and let me tell you: this is the best way to live. My real neighbors are the deer and opossums, our dogs and cats and chickens, and the unspoiled vista that is our view from our northwest facing screened-in porch.

So it was with some amusement that I read how Jason Peasley thinks we ought to all live in apartment buildings:

America Needs to End Its Love Affair With Single-Family Homes. One Town Is Discovering It’s a Tough Sell

Alana Semuels | Thursday, June 2, 2022 | 10:06 AM MDT

Steamboat Springs, Colorado – The question came, as it always did, just as Jason Peasley finished making his case for Brown Ranch, a development that would grow the size of his city by one-third and finally provide some affordable housing for the hundreds of people doubled up in trailer parks and hotel rooms in the ski town. The development, as Peasley pitched it to the room of residents gathered under thick wooden beams in the local community center, would use density to solve the housing problem—mainly by building apartments and attached homes.

“What about single family homes?” a woman standing in the back of the meeting room asked. “Because I would like to buy one someday.”

Steamboat Springs, Colo.—where Peasley serves as the head of the Yampa Valley Housing Authority, providing affordable housing to all of Routt County—is a mountain town that draws people for its wide open vistas and outdoor space. The idea of living in an apartment on what is now green rolling hills jarred people with visions of their own porches and yards, who had seen their neighbors amass hundreds of thousands of dollars in equity just by owning a single family home during the pandemic.

“Personally, I would take a very, very small house,” another resident said.

“So would I,” the woman in the back said quickly, so as not to be left out.

Peasley sighed. Nine months ago, he’d been given an opportunity that most urban planners dream of—an anonymous donation of 536 acres of land to build long-term affordable housing for people who live and work in Steamboat Springs. But it’s difficult to get buy-in to use hundreds of acres to build multifamily homes in Steamboat, which currently has 1,400 fewer housing units than are currently needed. Residents might support density in theory, but what they really want is a single-family home to call their own.

There’s more at the original, and it highlights what Americans really want: a home of their own. Perhaps not that many would like our home, several miles from any store, and with several acres to tend, but a home of their own is a common dream.

It isn’t, however, a dream that Joseph R Biden, the President of the United States, thinks you ought to have, despite owning large single family homes, plural, of his own:

Biden’s infrastructure plan calls for cities to limit single-family zoning and instead build affordable housing

Biden’s infrastructure bill aims to curb exclusionary zoning, which has led to racial segregation and climate vulnerability for low-income Americans.

Romina Ruiz-Goiriena | USA TODAY | Published 6:36 AM EDT Apr. 14, 2021 | Updated 5:36 PM EDT Apr. 14, 2021

President Joe Biden wants cities to put more apartment buildings and multifamily units, such as converted garages, in areas traditionally zoned for single-family housing. As part of his $2.3 trillion infrastructure plan, cities would allow for smaller lots and for apartment buildings with fewer than six units to be built next to a traditional house.

Current zoning laws that favor single-family homes – known as exclusionary zoning – have disproportionately hurt low-income Americans. Many of them can’t afford to buy a big lot of land, leaving them trapped in crowded neighborhoods earmarked in the past for Black and brown residents, while white families were able to move to single-family areas in the suburbs.

Except, of course, that isn’t good history. Look through the streets of Philadelphia, and you’ll see acres and acres of row homes, two and three stories tall, on small parcels of land. These homes were originally built not for “Black and brown residents”, but for the working class of Philadelphians, most of whom were white at the time.

Biden’s proposal would award grants and tax credits to cities that change zoning laws to bolster more equitable access to affordable housing. A house with a white picket fence and a big backyard for a Fourth of July barbecue may be a staple of the American dream, but experts and local politicians say multifamily zoning is key to combating climate change, racial injustice and the nation’s growing affordable housing crisis.

In other words, Mr Biden and his minions think that Americans ought to sacrifice their own dreams for the theoretical good of others. The wealthy Mr Biden doesn’t really think that the plebeians should aspire to something like the patricians already have.

U.S. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Marcia Fudge told USA TODAY that the administration’s plan would support communities looking to undo housing practices that too often discriminate against people of color.

“The result of this sort of investment will be critical to increasing housing options for low- and moderate-income families,” Fudge said.

Translation: Mr Biden and the left would rather make more people poorer because, social justice!

What, I wonder, would happen to the family who has worked hard for that single family frame house, surrounded by a white picket fence, in a neighborhood zoned for single family homes, when the city, under pressure from the feds, suddenly allows multi-family apartment buildings to be built beside it? It’s simple: the value of their home will decline, perhaps precipitously, and, in some cases, the views they may have had before will now be blotted out by the three-story monstrosity permanently shading one side of their property.

Oh, wait, I’m sorry: the entire concept of private property is racist!

The climate change mavens, so many of them younger and living in urban apartments, seem to believe that everyone needs to live like them, taking subways and buses everywhere, crammed into tiny apartments — though even liberal Amanda Marcotte fled a “shoebox of an apartment” in Brooklyn for South Philly — and that the basic character of Americans needs to be changed to what they think is best.

If someone wants to live in an apartment in a crowded city, that’s none of my business; Americans are free to live as they choose, within their means. But so much of the left seem to believe that their way is the only way, and that their way ought to be the only way allowed.