Hypocritical Policy

IT IS DIFFICULT to argue against any proposal which would add 50 apartments to Cambridge's notoriously tight housing market--especially when some of the units would earmarked for moderate- and low-income tenants. This is just what last week's agreement between Harvard and the Rent Control Board does.

The resolution to one of the longest-running town-gown conflicts is positive in that it will put some much needed rental units back on the market. But the way in which Harvard went about getting its cake and eating it too smacks of hypocrisy.

The tentative agreement ends a seven-year-old controversy over the fate of the now vacant Craigie Arms apartments, located across from the new Charles Square complex on Brattle St. Harvard bought the 88-year-old apartment building, which with 60 units was one of the city's largest, in 1967. Harvard stopped re-renting units in 1978 arising that the building was deteriorating rapidly and needed a major overhaul. Since then, the building's been in limbo-it's been a thorn in Harvard's side, the Rent Control Board's side, the City Council's side, the tenants coalition's side-well, in the side of just about everyone in Cambridge.

In the contest of the current state of things, the outcome is a good thing. After all, the city could only go on paying exorbitant legal fees to fight Harvard's appeals of Rent Control Board decisions for so long, especially while people combed the city daily for places to live. In return for 25 units reserved for low-income tenants--a number Harvard upped by 10 to make the compromise, the building will be taken off control. There are other catches on both sides: the University only has to keep the units under low-income rents for 15 years, and the building must remain residential for at least 30 years (despite being located at the center of one of the area's hottest office and retail markets).

The end result will be, if only temporarily, more affordable housing. There is something disturbing, however, in the way Harvard has chosen to pursue its real estate investment interests. There's something unsettling about the University's unilateral decision in 1978 to stop renting out units in Craigie Arms. Since then, other Harvard actions--including hefty cash settlements with tenants who were reluctant to leave their apartments and an admission that the building had been consciously neglected since its purchase (because Harvard could not decide what it wanted, to do with it)--have cast the University's good intentions into doubt.

Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of Harvard's stance is that they continue to profess a desire to preserve Cambridge's socio-economic and ethnic and racial diversity in spite of threatening that already precarious diversity by buying up all the property within its reach each and by trying to circumvent rent control. Now that Craigie Arms is behind us, it's time for the University to end its charade.

It is doubtful that any other landlord in Cambridge could have afforded to badger the Rent Control Board so persistently and for so long. One member of the board, who, ironically, supports landlord's rights, went so far as to label Harvard's pressure--legal and otherwise--as "a form of extortion." As the city's biggest landowner, the University must face up to the existence of one of the nation's toughest rent control policies. It should begin to live by the policies honestly instead of trying to circumvent them through legally questionable channels.

Harvard won this time, the Rent Control Board compromised under the pressure of the University and nearby developers with an interest in ridding the area of the Craigie eyesore. But such a victory only serves to drive the Ivory Tower further away from the community in which it exists.