Word: condos
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...outcome of tomorrow's election could be the preface to a softening in the stand of the Cambridge Civic Association (CCA), which currently strongly supports rent control and limitations on condominium conversion. If Mary Allen Wilkes, the "condo candidate," runs well or even wins, or if she loses and her votes transfer to Wendy Abt, the CCA candidate viewed as most flexible on housing issues, change will very definitely...
...least 2000 Cambridge apartments have been converted to condominiums in recent years. What the Wilkes and Abt vote could show is that condo owners have emerged as a distinct political bloc in this city. Two years ago it appeared they hadn't, no candidate appealed directly to them, and none benefited from their support. This year, though, Wilkes identified herself from the start as a liberal, except on housing issues, where she favors the right of some tenants to buy their own apartments as condominiums and is at strongest equivocal in her support of rent control...
...votes; on more particular enforcement questions, though, she may not be as tough. But what Abt will actually do is less important than what voters think she will do. She seems to be commanding support from many on the assumption that her commitment to rent control and condo limits are soft; a large transfer vote from Wilkes to Abt would indicate just that...
...Steering Committee, who sports a Wilkes button on his lapel. The message, he adds, is that the CCA has been "inflexible" on housing issues. And as Abt wrote in her statement to tenants, "without better data, it is irresponsible to dismiss alternatives and to insist on Rent Control and condo controls in exactly their current forms...
...searchers after that middle ground may be many. There are the condo owners, who though secure in their homes may feel a psychological identification with others trying to circumvent the regulations limiting such purchases. There are the tenants who want to buy their own homes. There is that, perhaps large, segment of the population that can be persuaded that a "rational, ordered" approach is the best way to deal with any problem. An earlier test of the size of this group--the can-didacies backed in 1979 by a group of self-proclaimed moderates, the Concerned Cambridge Citizens--failed because...