No Rent Hike

THE CAMBRIDGE Rent Board's recent decision to raise the rents of most tenants in Cambridge is a half-hearted attempt to deal with the inflationary prices and higher fuel costs that landlords are facing everywhere. Nobody can deny that landlords, who have absorbed the tremendous increases in fuel costs over the last year, have been treated unjustly. But in its decision to insure the landlords an excessively high net income margin--when workers' wages are not covered by similar guarantees and prices are not controlled--the rent board has relinquished any claims it might have had to be practicing equitable rent control.

Alfred Cohn, one of the two members representing the landlords on the rent board, has justified the roughly 14 per cent rent increase by citing landlords' rising costs. Cohn claims that while rents have risen only 31 per cent since 1963, landlords' costs have increased by 80 per cent. But Cohn did not mention the cumulative inflation of over 45 per cent since 1967 that has affected local tenants' entire lives, not just their rents.

The new rent hike comes in three separate, concrete parts: landlords will be allowed to "pass through" to tenants all of a 21 per cent tax increase instituted last July; all increased fuel costs; and an additional 3.1 per cent to compensate for the cost of living increase between 1973 to 1974.

All of these proposals are wrong. Because the tenants do not own the land they live on, and can never hope to profit from it, the full tax-burden should not fall on them alone. Tenants should not be required to pay all additional fuel costs because they already share that same burden at their jobs, where workers are being laid off and salaries are being frozen because of diminishing energy resources. The cost of living raise--the most equitable sounding measure of the three--should not be granted because no similar raise has been guaranteed the tenants. As long as there are no federal wage, price or profit controls, raising rents is like instituting wage controls without price or profit controls.

Ideally, tenants' rents should be adjusted according to their ability to pay. But since that kind of change isn't immediately forthcoming it's essential that tenants and landlords share the increased taxes and the rising cost of fuel. And it is absolutely vital, not only to tenants but to all who live in Cambridge, that the cost of living increase be rescinded.

If appropriate action is not taken by the rent board before the new increase takes effect March 1st, Cambridge's tenants have every right to go out on rent strikes.