|
-------Original Message-------
Date: Wednesday, May
16, 2001 09:18:26 AM
Subject: Housing Now:
Bill would label jails low-income housing
"HOUSING FOR PEOPLE, NOT FOR PROFIT"
Bill would
label jails low-income housing
By Rick Klein, Globe Staff,
5/16/2001
It's housing all right, and it sure is affordable -
at least to those who are living there.
But to housing
advocates, there's something amiss and even a tad offensive about a bill
sponsored by Representative John H. Rogers, the House's chief budget
writer.
Rogers wants jail and prison inmates counted as
low-income housing units for a range of purposes, including qualifying
host towns and cities for state grants and bolstering them against
challenges to zoning rulings on affordable housing.
Housing
activists, however, say the idea is misguided and could harm efforts to
expand housing for low- and moderate-income residents in
Massachusetts.
''It certainly feels dodgy,'' said Ellen Ober, a
leader with the Greater Boston Interfaith Organization. ''It just doesn't
sit well. It devalues the efforts and integrity of the towns that have
enacted affordable housing.''
The Housing and Urban Development
Committee will take up Rogers' bill today, along with a raft of other
proposals regarding the state's anti-snob zoning regulations. Rogers did
not return calls for comment.
An aide said that Rogers, a
Norwood Democrat, filed the bill at the urging of his constituents in
neighboring Walpole. The aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said
that many residents want Walpole to qualify
for state housing grants
and benefits to help ease the burden of MCI-Cedar Junction, the
maximum-security prison in town.
Cities and towns that have
correction facilities could gain substantially by including those inmates
in affordable-housing tallies, said Marc Draisen, president of the
Massachusetts Association of Community Development
Corporations.
Adding prisoners to the count would boost a
community's ability to get state grants and loans. It would also make it
tougher to challenge how a community complies with Chapter 40B, the
anti-snob zoning law that
requires cities and towns to have an
appropriate percentage of lower-priced residences.
If the
proposal passes, Chapter 40B would be almost impossible to enforce in some
towns, Draisen said. That's because local decisions on where to build
lower-priced housing can be challenged only if a
community's
affordable-housing stock is less than 10 percent of its
total.
A town such as Walpole would easily exceed that
threshold if prison cells were included in the count, Draisen
said.
''Towns are always trying to get up over the 10 percent
so that they don't have to build affordable housing,'' he said. ''Inmates
are not people who could receive assistance from affordable-housing
programs. It's not relevant that they're low-income and that they live in
the town. They already have the housing that they're going to
get.''
In addition, the bill could dampen new construction of
lower-priced homes in some communities by creating the illusion that they
already have enough, Ober said.
Senate housing chairman Steven
C. Panagiotakos, a Lowell Democrat, said that cities and towns with
prisons already receive compensation from the state, and shouldn't look
for more money by manipulating their housing statistics, he
said.
''To equate prison cells to affordable housing units is
wrong,'' he said.
Representative Alice K. Wolf, a Cambridge
Democrat who serves on the housing committee, said that she'll keep a
skeptical eye on any proposals to change the anti-snob zoning
law.
''In general, Chapter 40B is a very important vehicle that
the Commonwealth has for ensuring that some affordable housing is built -
and, more than that, that it be spread around,'' she said.
Rick
Klein can be reached by e-mail at [EMAIL PROTECTED]
This story
ran on page A01 of the Boston Globe on 5/16/2001.
© Copyright 2001
Globe Newspaper Company.
|
