The real background for this has nothing to do with prisons but looking at any excuse to chip away at low-income housing laws. The impact would be felt in preventing low-income housing from being built in the towns with prisons and jails. Most wealthy towns in Massachusetts (particularly in eastern Mass) have local by-laws to restrict growth. The effect of these by-laws is rather severe and tends to drive up the assessed value of the housing being built. The lack of low-income housing is severe and has been for at least 25 years. Massachusetts progressives passed a law that says that towns could not restrict any development that included low-income housing if the town had less than 10% of the housing stock deemed "low-income".
The net effect in the real world has been mixed. Many progressive communities have sought the 10% level as a target, while most wealthy/restrictive towns have kept restrictive by-laws to "seal in freshness" while using other means to prevent low-income development. There are not too many developers who are genuinely interested in providing low-income housing. There are hundreds of developments in Massachusetts that used "low-income" subsidies and legal frameworks to get themselves built only to turn around and jack up rent to move low-income people out. This is the most common use of "low-income" development laws in the capitalist housing market.
Restricting development always gets tricky politically because there are progressive environmental/conservation goals that get mixed up with locking in privilege and fostering racism. For many Massachusetts Democrats, however, this is not a contradiction but their apparent goal.
Peace,
Jim
At 06:04 AM 5/16/01, you wrote:
>Not as crazy as it sounds, actually. Presently I
>believe inmate populations count as a local jurisdiction's
>population for receiving certain grants-in-aid from the
>Feds. Course, the inmates never see a nickel of the
>money. Low-income housing factors are also used in
>some grant formulas, so might as well count jails
>too. Course, the inmates will never see any of
>that money either. It's possible that jurisdictions
>with prisons tend to be poor, so the implied targeting
>might not be bad.
If you could hold the frozen flow of New Hope Creek And hide out from the one they said you might meet If you could unlearn all the words That you never wanted heard If you could stall the southern wind That's whistling in your ear You could take what is What is What is To what can never be
-Katell Keinig, "Gulf of Araby"