What's in a Study? Besides Political Motivations?

Looking at the Maine housing study that recommends a State take over of municipal ordinances and how it attempts to reconcile State corporatism with Home Rule.

Max Bovkun Unsplash

This week the Boothbay Town Selectmen approved Washburn and Doughty’s plans for a worker’s boarding house and approved an affordable workforce housing development for $50,000 dollars in municipal American Rescue Plan Act funds.

The development is described by Erin Cooperrider, vice-president, and treasurer of the Boothbay Region Development Corporation as “local housing stock affordable and available to the workforce”. The latter phrasing suggests housing that is available only to those whose work function serves a purpose in the community planning master plan. Why not just say that is affordable and available? The noun, workforce, suggests a corporate need rather than a human need, useful for selling the industrial park, with convenient workforce housing, and an eighty-million dollar school where students can be industrially trained starting in secondary school and the training will be paid by the taxpayers. The term “workforce housing” is a constant reminder and a…