Word: counciling
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...rent control--a complicated, ambiguous policy issue--come to have such a symbolic significance for those who packed the council chambers...
...City Council has always been the focal point or at least the chief arena of politics in Cambridge, yet it is a body which possesses relatively little power. The City Manager has far more. Under the City's proportional representation system of elections, city councillors get to be city councillors by appealing, each to his own, to small, well defined groups of voters who usually live in one specific area of the City. Given their lack of power, city councillors try to satisfy "their people" in small ways--for example by getting them a traffic light--and by emotion-charged...
...Packed council chambers are always likely to spark symbolic confrontations, and the chambers were very packed indeed during the rent control debate. In large part, this was due to the idea behind the entire housing convention movement, an idea currently popular with Federal agencies in Cambridge and elsewhere--"citizen participation." The young CEOC staff members who, behind the scenes, did much of the housing convention organizing take "citizen participation" in local government as one of their guiding lights and speared no pains to assure a large turnout of angry citizens for the council meeting and housing convention rallies...
MOST OF THE housing proposals, for example, will require approval of plans or zoning changes by the City Council. And it is almost axiomatic that even if everyone in a city is in favor of more low-income housing, just about no one wants a housing project in his neighborhood. If a zoning change is requested to build a housing project on any given site, it's a good bet that thirty neighbors of the site will come down to the council to tell them why the project would ruin the neighborhood. It is difficult to build a countervailing force...
Furthermore, the votes of the "faithless five," as they have come to be termed, have alienated many housing convention members from the council; they feel that a majority of the council is not in favor of any real action on the housing crisis. The view is understandable since, for those who fought for it, rent control is the most real action that can be taken. Yet, given the very mixed consequences of the proposal, it is quite possible to reach the conclusion that rent control would do more harm than good. This, more than the fabled dollars of landlords...