(photo: Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office)

“Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever,” declared Alabama Governor George Wallace in 1963. This racist trope pandered to white voters and could not have been clearer, just as recent remarks by President Donald Trump were to white suburban voters.

Trump contends that implementing an Obama-era federal housing department rule designed to assist all communities (not just suburbs) to meet their legal obligation under the 1968 Fair Housing Act to “affirmatively further fair housing” (AFFH) will “totally destroy

(Photo via Ed Reed/Mayor's Office)

Curbed NY recently reported that the vast majority of the affordable-housing units created under Mayor Bill de Blasio’s Housing New York plan are unaffordable to large swaths of the population. The ironic response from New York City’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) was that the policy promotes “diverse and integrated neighborhoods.”

This explanation is

(rendering of new affordable housing being built in the Bronx, via HPD)

In Mayor Bill de Blasio’s 2017 State of the City speech delivered at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, he referred to the affordable housing crisis as a threat to “the very soul of the city.” The singularity of that “soul” captures de Blasio’s desired outcome of “the tale of two cities,” which he has said exists in New York,