Word: controls
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Cambridge is likely to have around 42,000 registered voters. In the City Council elections two years ago, about 31,000 voters turned out. Thus, if the turnout is the same this time, and all voters in the council election also vote either "yes" or "no" on the rent control bill, the required simple majority of those voting would be about 15,500, which would also be more than one-third of all the registered voters in the City
...FIGHT over rent control for Cambridge waged around City Hall during the past few weeks has been one of the most emotionally charged disputes ever to take place in the City's politics. Especially for its proponents, rent control came to be a symbolic showdown, a last ditch struggle against the forces which have been inexorably transforming the Cambridge they have known into a new City--one which they are best regard suspiciously...
...signs and the rhetoric with which the steps of City Hall were filled during the Cambridge Housing Convention's vigil there all the story well. There seemed to be no middle ground for those pushing for rent control. A poster pictured the hands of nine city councillors: the hands of the four councillors who voted for the housing convention's rent control ordinance are clean; those of the five opposed are splattered with blood. As housing convention vice-chairman Bill Joyce saw it, the four backed "the little people of Cambridge," while the five voted for "rent gougers, speculators, banks...
...debate within the council chambers was much the same. Discussing rent control as an issue of public policy is difficult at best, for its consequences are highly ambiguous and an overall evaluation depends mostly on the weight one places on their various aspects...
...Rent control protects some tenants somewhat against rent increases, though which tenants are really helped and the extent of their protection remain unclear. It does tend to hurt landlords, though clever speculators can usually find a way over, under, or around such a law, creating a black market in housing. It hampers new construction, and consequently reduces a city's potential tax base (and the amount of money it has to spend)--but the time needed for major damage to new construction is primarily guesswork. On paper, rent control laws are an added weapon for building code enforcement, but they...