Homes Within Range

Discouraging words and cloudy prospects are part of the usual welcome for the University's 2,160 married students who have to find apartments in or near Cambridge. Very few couples are able to secure space in the limited Harvard projects, and private apartments are often expensive, small, and far from the Square. Although most married students can put together some money and imagination to convert their garrets into livable quarters, present University policy is about as make-shift as the apartments themselves.

The University accepted, in principle, its responsibility to married students when the Harvard Trust, formed in the 1920's, set up three housing projects for graduate students: Shaler Lane, Gibson Terrace, and Holden Green. Together, these developments have 173 units--scarcely enough for today's large number of married students. Yet even this small number of units is not restricted to students connected with Harvard. A survey taken last year showed that at least 30 suites were occupied by people who once had been students here but were no longer tied to the University in any way. When rent controls end in December, the Trust, composed of the University and alumni, should act quickly to terminate the remaining leases of non-Harvard renters and make room for the many students now knocking on the project's doors.

Besides the three small but desirable housing projects, the University has set up two offices which list rooms and apartments available in Cambridge. But the Housing Registry in Phillips Brooks House and the Harvard Wives' Adviser in Weld Hall largely duplicate each other's work in the field of housing. The Wives' Adviser, of course, has other duties--such as finding jobs and baby sitters for married students--but there is no reason that the inadequate housing services of both the Wives and the Registry could not be combined to form a fully-staffed and well-financed office for housing rentals. At present, for example, PBH is branching out into the type of service--full-scale inspection--which an expanded University office could more easily undertake.

Even if a new and expanded Housing office were set up, the result would be at best an incomplete solution to the real problem: the lack of inexpensive housing for married students. At present, rents around the Square often soar above $100 per month, and some students are forced to live as far away as Wellesley. The long-term and most obvious answer is for the University to build a large-scale housing development. The capacity enrollment in the present graduate center and the long waiting lists for the Harvard projects surely show that students will gladly use University housing once provided.

A subsidized housing project, of course, cannot rise overnight, and stop-gap measures are needed now. But high on the list of any new building plans should be a housing development with rents inside the range of married students' bank accounts.