Word: controllers
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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That is about 90 per cent of what one can say about the economic consequences of rent control. All of it was said, to be sure, repeatedly in the council chambers, but the discussion of the policy occupied but a small portion of the debate. Most of it focused on a simple, symbolic theme. Tenants--usually pictured as long-time residents of Cambridge--were being thrown out of their homes by rapacious landlords grasping for the higher rents students and other transients could pay. Eviction lists, tales of widows and amputees, and even skits were used to hammer...
...showdown in every sense of the word. Scuffles erupted in the council corridors between opponents and supporters of rent control. Women wept. Men cursed. Some women cursed. When the council, for the second time, voted down the convention's bill, for its supporters it was as if the guys in the black hats had shotgunned the guys in the white hats and had then ridden off into the sunset...
...rent control--a complicated, ambiguous policy issue--come to have such a symbolic significance for those who packed the council chambers...
FACED WITH these threats, many of the older residents of Cambridge have been looking for a solution or, perhaps more accurately, a panacea. Rent control on its face appeared to offer it: an insurance that one could stay the rest of one's days in the familial apartment, free from worries about rent increases. No matter that a rent control bill, any rent control bill, can't provide complete protection against rent raises, that it won't stop, the Inner Belt, or that it may even be impossible for Cambridge to pass a rent control ordinance without a specific enabling...
Undoubtedly, this is how the bulk of the "little people" who filled City Hall felt, and this is why they found it impossible to react with anything other than anger to any action which appeared to hurt the chances for rent control...