Rent Control Study Draws Political Fire

An effort by a city councilor to invalidate a Cambridge regulation that prevents rent-control housing from being converted to condominiums has drawn criticism from his colleagues.

Councilor William H. Walsh, who won his seat in 1985 as an opponent of rent control, said last week that he hopes to use a provision of a council ordinance to end the protection of rent-control apartments.

Council Ordinance number 966 stipulates that the protection of rent-control housing will expire if the amount of rental units in Cambridge exceeds the number of units in 1970, or if the city's housing vacancy rate tops 4 percent. Walsh has asked the city's rent control board to determine whether the former condition exists.

If the ordinance expires, landlords will be able to remove rent-controlled apartments from the market and replace them with unregulated condominiums. Rent control advocates have said that this development would raise the cost of housing in Cambridge beyond the means of many students and townspeople.

"All I can say is that that's non-sense," Councilor Francis H. Duehay '55 said of Walsh's assertion. "There is a tremendously tight housing market in Cambridge, and the lifting of the ordinance would mean that a tremendous number of apartments would be converted to condominiums," he said.

The city's housing vacancy rate is currently about 1 percent, officials said. In addition. Cambridge officials and several city councilors have said that the number of apartments in Cambridge has not increased beyond its 1970 level.

Margaret Drury, executive director of the Cambridge Rent Control Board (CRCB), said she had "no reason to believe that the number of units has increased" since the last CRCB study in 1983.

CRCB Assistant Councilor Donna Tuhey added that "there has been construction in Cambridge [since 1970], but I doubt it's significant--there's not a lot of space in Cambridge."

Councilor Alice Wolf noted that the past decade's censuses have shown a steady decrease in the city's population, from about 95,000 people in 1980 to about 87,000 in last year's census. "It seems almost impossible to me that there would be more rental units now than there were then. Where would they put them?" she asked, adding that condominium conversions have reduced the number of rentals tremendously in recent years.

"This is part of his attack on rent control," she added. "He'll keep trying; that's what he was elected to do and he raised $45,000 [in 1985 campaign funds] to do it."