Housing: Perennial Issue

Cambridge elections traditionally have far fewer major issues relative to state and national races because voters seem to care most about the candidates' style. Cambridge-born? Liberal? Colorful and entertaining? For the most part, this election will be no different from its predecessors. Even rent control, the one significant exception to the no-issues rule, has become more a means of categorizing candidates than an aid with which to understand their views.

The Cambridge City Council, with the aid of a home-rule petition in the state legislature, adopted a strict rent control ordinance in 1971. Median household rents skyrocketed by 70 per cent during the '60s, and the ever accelerating stream of students and young professionals moving into Cambridge indicated there was little chance of future relief. The city's rules exempted only owner-occupied dwellings with less than four rental units, federal- and state-subsidized housing, and all housing built after 1968. What further galls rent control opponents is that the city's rent control board--which grants rent increases and rule exemptions--is a fair but tough interpreter of the law, and it has not diluted the controls' intents.

Liberal (defined in Cambridge politics as supporting the Cambridge Convention's platform) membership of the council has fluctuated since '71, but the laws have still stayed on the books. Critics of the law claim it discourages housing construction and maintenance by making real estate an unprofitable business. Though landlords have not been declaring bankruptcy because of rent ceilings, a changed housing market has made their situation less desirable. Since the Federal Reserve Board tightened the money supply and drove up the lending rates in the early '70s, the homebuilding industry in Massachusetts has shriveled with only recent indications that it may be revived. The rent control board grants increases for repairs and inflation but Cambridge landlords are missing out on the windfall profits created by a tight market.

Enter condominium conversion. A landlord can convert a 15-unit apartment building worth $200,000 into 15 condominiums that sell for $25,000 or more apiece. To make the conversion even more popular, a high percentage of Cambridge's housing stock is old and often in need of major repairs. By converting, the owner can unload his property without major expense and still cash in on the laws of supply and demand.

Maria Mantzaris, a tenant in a building owned by the city's largest landlord and most ambitious converter Harlow Properties, testified at a city council hearing that she paid only $92 a month rent because Harlow Properties refuses to correct the building's numerous safety and sanitary code violations. Harlow Properties has scheduled the building in which she lives for conversion.

William Walsh, attorney for Harlow Properties and several other major Cambridge landlords, said last week that the Harlow family has sent letters to all of its tenants urging them to vote for anti-rent control candidates David Sullivan, a CC '77 council candidate, says the feelings of Harlow's tenants are such that this letter would only encourage them further to vote for pro-rent control candidates.

Most rent control opponents react to conversion by calling for either a prohibition of evictions by landlords who want to convert apartments of by going further and placing a limit on conversions. City Councilor David Clem says the rent control board approved only four requests for eviction by converting landlords between January and September of 1977. Conversion opponents claim, however, that landlords are frightening many more tenants who do not know their legal rights or are just too afraid to exercise them.

There were 197 conversions out of the city's 36,000 housing units in the first nine months of 1977, but the city's threat to rent control by conversion is seen much more as a potential than as a current phenomenon. Harlow Properties plans to convert all 500 of its housing units and has only been prevented by a marketing study that urged a delay in order to prevent a glut. Unchecked, the conversions will whittle away at the supply of available low and middle income housing. The elderly in Cambridge are especially vulnerable, as most live on fixed incomes and find it difficult to find new apartments and to move.

The city council rejected five motions to control conversions at a meeting several weeks ago, and finally decided to ask the state legislature to approve four month stays of conversion-prompted evictions for elderly people.

Following the usual split, Councilors Barbara Ackerman, Francis H. Duehay '55, Saundra Graham and Mayor Alfred E. Vellucci voted for the curbs, while independents Clem, Daniel J. Clinton, Thomas W. Danehy, Leonard J. Russell and Walter J. Sullivan opposed all but the weakest of the petitions.

What further compounds the already present threats to rent control is that if he wins reelection, Clem says he will propose a rent control "improvement" that, while it would not gut the existing laws, would loosen them and impress many as opening the door to more extensive changes.

Clem favors conditional decontrol that would exempt four- to six-unit, owner-occupied buildings if the landlord makes specific improvements and convinces the board the increase does not remove the unit from the low or moderate income housing supply. He has not moved for this change on the council floor, Clem says, because that might give the appearance he is caving into the independents. So Clem says he will wait until after the results are in and consider the vote to be partly a referendum on the idea. Some critics argue that acting on the suggestion would have a much greater negative impact at the polls than merely talking about it.

The question of rent control and its off-shoot, condominium conversion, has fueled the election fires somewhat, creating much more heat than light. Since Clem has taken on the role of a fence-sitter, the council has left the future of rent control in a state of inertia. During one of the council's rhetorical debates of the subject, Graham said, "This doesn't mean very much at all because we don't have five votes for anything." Whatever the outcome of tomorrow's election, there will finally be five votes in the council to decide the issue of rent control and condominium conversion, one way or the other