An Alternative Proposal for Affordable Housing and Economic Development
Listen to the winds of change and then take the lead!
Two days ago, the internet stopped working, the earliest repair appointment that can be had is on the 17th about two weeks from now. Spectrum says it is highly unusual to have this much of a backlog. It might be the modem, might be the line and It might affect posting.
Normally, one expects the repair person to arrive within a day unless there is a massive outage. Spectrum said there are about 10 people without internet in the area but that is not enough to count as an outage even though it is a large number around here.
Why is Spectrum having such difficulty in sending a repair service when there is no major outage? Could it be because there are an unusual number of outages in local areas like ours that go under the radar of public attention, each one not counting enough to meet the bar of a major outage but collectively having the same effect on Spectrum’s ability to deliver service? Hmmm.
Update
After the candidates for selectmen, those people who will write the ordinances and appoint the planning board were announced last week, the election was held on Monday with a large win for Russell Pinkham.
There is no time to get to know the candidates and so one of the decisive issues is, do we want someone local or someone new to the area, and after that do we want someone who campaigns on workforce housing or someone who campaigns on creative financing and corporate development?
On the first issue, I stand in the in-between.
Given no further definition, workforce housing, and creative financing are political talking points. Put them together and you get the Martha’s Vineyard Island Housing Trust and workforce housing becomes serfforce housing. When the employer controls both the working environment and the personal living space, that is close enough to Twenty-First Century slave quarters to serve as a signpost that we are going in the wrong direction on a one-way street.
Small Town Politics
For years I studied the networked channels of wealth accumulation and transference designed by lawyers and legislatures. I came to understand the whole through the parts. Lately, I have observed an increase in the secrecy with which the affairs of the wealth redistribution complex are conducted.
The Boothbay Region Housing Trust wants to bring Martha’s Vineyard Island Institute’s affordable housing solution to Boothbay but is telling the public very little about what that actually means. The selling point promoted by BRHT is that the targeted workforce housing is inspired by Martha’s Vineyard as if it is beyond dispute that we should look up to Martha’s Vineyard for inspirational guidance.
Huh?
In Martha’s Vineyard if you are a skilled worker in a profession that requires years of higher education, then you are one of the lucky targeted members of the workforce, who, for about a thousand dollars a month can buy a room for rent in a communal living situation controlled by your employer. I do not know where trust comes into this picture. Matching housing qualifications with employers is nothing short of draconian control over the working classes in every aspect of their lives.
Meanwhile, the Maine Legislature just voted for LD 2003 that allows up to two units on plots zoned for single family use and accessory dwelling units and up to four units in designated “growth areas.”, a throwback to the Industrial Revolution when the sizes of living spaces became smaller and smaller and smaller, solving the symptom, ignoring the cause and the deeper core issues that have led to the Great Resignation.
Game Over!
Once you could have fooled the workforce but today the workforce has figured out that they are just trading pawns in a game played by larger forces negotiating for mutual self-interest. The clarity of recognition among the workforce is the reason why the Great Resignation is not slowing down. The workforce has had enough, and they are not going to take it anymore!
An alternative is that the future planners of the Peninsula start listening to what the workforces want. A peninsula is a small geographical community isolated from the mainstream. A peninsula doesn’t have to model itself on a megalopolis. A peninsula is a world of its own, making it an ideal location for an alternate culture. The world needs alternatives. Let the Boothbay Peninsula become a leader, not a follower on a road that leads to more of the same.
Non-profit giving offers a cover of secrecy to the donors in a system that seamlessly aligns for-profit institutions, public institutions, and non-profit institutions. Who is the donor that contributed funds to the Boothbay Region Housing Trust? Who are the donors that paid for the architects to design a fifty-million-dollar school? It’s on a need-to-know basis. It’s not you who needs to know, just the people making the deals- that is the way it used to work in the private sector, but now that all sectors are merged into one continuous stream, it works that way in all sectors.
Once the contributors to non-profit organizations were listed on non-profit websites. In the case of the fifty-million-dollar school, not yet approved by the voters, but advanced through an architectural design process paid for with non-profit money, we do not know the donors nor the name of the organization through which the donation was made. The gift is not found on Education Boothbay, the fund listed on the AOS website. The funding of the architectural design goes through its own channels which are none of your business.
The Seamless Orchestration
About a year ago, when the Boothbay Harbor elections were underway, I noticed several different voices talking on seemingly separate subjects that fit together like a cloud. I could not know how much was by intent. Did they meet in private and strategically plan the cloud formation or is the local climate a reflection of a centralized order they work by independently?
Let us hope that should the school win voter approval, the financing for it will not be deals made with large corporations hidden behind NDA agreements concealing the identity of the corporation until the deal is done, so that as the voters vote, they do not know the identity of the corporation that they are capitalizing with tax exemptions and subsidies, which will surely be in play somewhere in the cloud.
Through reading the laws and legal structures, the web of wealth redistribution is revealed. Public, private, for-profit, and nonprofit, are not separate sectors but one system that usually benefits the architects of the system, while packaged as benefitting others- thus the popular phrase of the day “the workforce”, meaning workers who serve the needs of the elite, trading pawns in negotiations between the State and its private partners, required by corporations in order to locate in your neighborhood.
In the example of the Martha’s Vineyard Island Housing Trust, a non-profit arranges with a corporation that affordable housing will go exclusively to workforces needed by that corporation. It is frightening, not only for the workforce but for other businesses that cannot get employees because all available affordable housing is monopolized by non-profit, for-profit relationships.
Martha’s Vineyard Island Housing Trust is not concerned about the lack of affordable housing for people of ordinary means. Martha’s Vineyard is solving a need in its wealthy community for working people to perform essential functions within the community in an era when working for a living no longer provides enough to afford a home. The workers essential to the wealthy people who own all the property on Martha’s Vineyard need a place to rest their heads, which is about the size of what the Island Trust Fund provides for hospital workers.
When a room for rent is the housing solution for skilled essential workers, it follows that a homeless warehouse with two hundred beds a room is an acceptable solution for the remainder of displaced populations.
The latter is financed through Coastal Enterprises Incorporated’s for-profit subsidiary, CEI-Boulos. Boulos is a private real estate company that targets opportunity zone investments across the nation, as a model L form of fiscal sponsorship.
Will the 200-bed-per-room homeless shelter located in an industrial opportunity zone in Portland, Maine be replicated across the USA? Opportunity zones exist across the nation, like an investor’s superhighway.
Why?
Why are homeless shelters being built in industrial zones with opportunity zone incentives? The homeless shelter must be classified as a business creating jobs rather than a shelter for the forlorn, but it is a home for those taking shelter there. It is a home in a business located in a warehouse in an industrial opportunity zone. It is horrific. Are we returning to the worst of the worst of Industrial Revolution society?
Another Kind of Opportunity Zone
One might ask, why not locate businesses in a home in an opportunity zone? What type of opportunity zone would that be? It would be a community in which the worker rents or owns both the home and the means of production creating an opportunity for the worker to improve his life through his own talents.
Fiscal sponsorship for working class entrepreneurs as conceptually proposed in the Andersen Design Museum of American Designer Craftsmen, opens the gates to debt-free non-profit funding sources for the working classes. If a homeless warehouse falls under the economic development rubric of “job creation” then why not a business in a home?
Both satisfy a dual purpose- economic development and affordable housing but on very different terms. One is a throwback to the Industrial Revolution solutions and the other is a throwback to pre-Industrial Revolution culture when production took place in cottages owned by the working classes.
We are now moving past the age of the Industrial Revolution into the Automated Revolution, we no longer need to be constricted by the needs of the Industrial Revolution. The Automated Revolution reconfigures the workscape. It can be a change for the better. It can be a change for the worse, We are charting the course now.
Back to the Source
When the Maine Legislature created its network of state corporations, it did so in violation of Article IV Part Third Section 14 of the Maine Constitution:
Section 14. Corporations, formed under general laws. Corporations shall be formed under general laws and shall not be created by special Acts of the Legislature, except for municipal purposes, and in cases where the objects of the corporation cannot otherwise be attained; and, however formed, they shall forever be subject to the general laws of the State.
The Maine Legislature created its own network of corporations, which all together form the corporate state, which like all corporations, acts in its own self-interest. The Legislature provided that each State corporation can accept money from any source. From the beginning, the purpose of public-private relationships was to combine diverse streams of wealth into one mainstream, centrally controlled by one agenda, and one agenda only- that of the corporate state.
Open Back Door Quid Pro Quo Policy
The FAME Corporation §969-A. Powers and duties of the authority
14-A. Receive funds. Receive and accept from any source allocations, appropriations, loans, grants and contributions of money or other things of value to be held, used or applied to carry out this chapter, subject to the conditions upon which the loans, grants and contributions may be made, including, but not limited to, appropriations, allocations, loans, grants or gifts from any federal agency or governmental subdivision or the State and its agencies. ….[1991,c. 780,Pt. P,§1(AMD).]
The language of the statute states that private sources can fund the government by using a singular term, “any” with its terms defined as “including, but not limited to”. in other words, “anything goes”. make it up as you go. Governmental power is for sale.
If a hospital and a non-profit organization can make a deal to selectively regulate who is allowed to rent coveted affordable housing, then why not make a similar deal with any type of corporation? Is this the sort of creative financing that might be used to attract large companies to the Industrial Park? The Peninsula cannot compete on tax exemptions and subsidies with MRRA, the municipal corporation chartered by the State Legislation to serve as its own instrument. MRRA is both a designated Pine Tree Zone and a designated Opportunity Zone, but if the Peninsula can offer free job training through our public school system (thanks to the Industrial Partnerships Act of 2013) and targeted industry corporate control over who can occupy the available affordable housing, perhaps, with our natural setting, Boothbay can compete with Maine State Inc. That sounds like a plan written in the cloud.
But why? What is the sense in that? It creates a completely controlled society, exactly what the Great Resignation rejects. What are the alternative paths that a peninsula can take? I submit that geographically a peninsula is well suited to develop an alternative culture to that of the mainstream. It was here, in the good old days of the 1950’s, when a talented middle-class husband and wife team could have the freedom to set up a business in a home and do their own thing, following in the footsteps of alternate movements that came before them in response to the Industrial Revolution, The developing years of Weston and Brenda Andersen occurred during the age of plastics and the Andersens responded with a mission to create a handcrafted product affordable to the middle classes. Today is the era of three-D printing and the response still holds its meaningful significance.
The Good Old Days
When Andersen Design was born on the Boothbay Peninsula in 1952, it was a middle-class community with a wealthy class that maintained a low profile and did not dominate the culture. It was the Golden Age of the American Middle Class, a time before the mid-seventies when the Maine Legislature took over the central management of the economy, and thereafter the wealth divide increased at an accelerated rate as the whole of the economy was used to subsidize the top.
Stop! Look! And Listen!
At this time with assorted unregulated forces entering into home ownership including non-profit housing trusts, AirBnB's and corporate investors packaging single family homes into investment packages, one alternative pathway is to create a 501(3)© that will function as a fiscal sponsor for working class businesses in a home, and writing municipal code that is as friendly to home businesses as states are to large corporate culture.
It's not going to solve everything but it’s a start. Charting the course of history from the time when the cottage industries were the means of production, and standing at the present looking into the future, traveling on the current path is looking like a journey into dystopia. Freedom and human dignity are vanishing.
Turn around.
Try a different path.
If non-profit ownership of housing is accepted under the rubric of "affordable workforce housing" then by the same token, so should businesses in a home.
Businesses in the home are opportunity zones.
The Andersen Design Museum creative financing plan, if properly crafted can potentially grant ownership of the means of production and home ownership to the worker. The Museum as Model A fiscal sponsorship makes it possible for working class entrepreneurs to apply for non-profit funding. They are on their own in procuring the funding but the same gateway is opened to the working classes that is open to most other sectors of the economy. Currently, a Housing Trust can raise non-profit funds for a property that it rents to the working classes as affordable housing, all the while paying for the ownership with the rents. With Model A fiscal sponsorship, the working class designers and makers can apply for the non-profit funding and become the owners of the property. Better yet, the property will provide adequate space for a work-life balance, more than a room for rent. Then they can pay for the ownership costs that remain with the fruits of their designs and productivity, and potentially create jobs for others.
But the problem is the Museum does not exist because there is no board. I am not part of the cloud and so finding a board is not easy. If I can find a board, it will form a new and different cloud. Everybody needs a cloud. The more clouds the merrier.
Obviously, this is not an affordable housing solution for all but the region already has much better affordable housing solutions than does Martha Vineyard, most of them developed by Coastal Enterprises Incorporated. The region needs more solutions. If we are going to introduce something new into the picture, we can go the route of Martha’s Vineyard, tying both home and work environments to employer control, or we could support the Andersen Design Museum of American Designer Craftsmen and develop affordable housing and economic development using the business in a home model in which the worker controls both the work and home environment. This will also require accommodating ordinances.
Also published on Medium’s Age of Awareness