FAULTY REASONING

To the Editor of The Crimson:

Both The Crimson and Councilperson Graham have been arguing that housing sites on the Riverside be reserved for the poor. Yet such thinking is simply ideological and demagogic, and in the end only hurts the poor.

The simplest and most, important fact is that the Riverside sites are the most expensive in Cambridge. For the cost of putting up housing for the poor, one could probably put up 50 percent more housing elsewhere. If the poor live in these houses, they could only do so with a rental subsidy. But who is going to pay for it? The Federal government has stopped giving money for housing. Such subsidies can only come from taxpayers. And why would they pay for these, especially when some of these persons would be excluded from riverside housing by quotas for the poor? So these persons will continue to move away, to Belmont, to Newton, to Weston, and Cambridge will become more and more of a "homogeneous city" of poor, with a few small enclaves around Brattle Street and the Norton woods where Harvard professors live. Yet if housing on the river were priced at full market value, Cambridge would get increasing tax revenues, which would allow it to finance more projects to help the poor.

The faulty reasoning of The Crimson and Councilperson Graham is most in evident in their opposition to a proposed redevelopment of the industrial and freight areas behind the river between M.I.T. and Cambridge. Again comes the oppositional shibboleth: no, make it housing for the poor -- even though the area is a wasteland and any housing would be isolated, and the people live anomic lives.

The Crimson sometimes has a box of news which it labels, "The Real World." Perhaps it is being sardonic. Yet the editors should learn some economics. For one day, to their dismay, they will wake up in "the real world" and then what will they say? Will Kistil '73