Word: rented
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
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...
...agency--could not, even if they wanted to, which most probably didn't-moderate these emotions. The housing convention had lapsed into a period of inactivity after its formation and initial pleas to the City government, the universities and everyone else to "do something" about housing. The ferment over rent control revived the organization evaporate, as its supporters would drift instead to the Cambridge Rent Control Referendum, the radical group pushing for rent control...
Thus, the appeal of rent control as an issue--and the need to keep the housing convention going--made it likely that many a sign would be waved and many a voice would be raised on the issue. Yet more general factors--the style of Cambridge politics and the idea behind the agitation over the specific issue of rent control--were also at work...
...doing this, of course, and might not even want to, but his advocacy of such action strikes responsive chords in his East Cambridge supporters. Even in normal times, which these are not, politics in the City are apt to be heavily charged with rhetoric; the passions inherent in the rent control issue were amplified by this political style...