Word: tenants
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...current tenants who won't buy? Brookline, which last year repealed a similar law, illustrates this danger: the Brookline Rent Control Board and tenant activists heard that tenants were "encouraged" to leave if they didn't want to buy. And the problem of harassment is difficult to prove and even harder to stop...
Even owners of single-family houses find their lives regulated. If a faculty family goes, say, to Washington or Berkeley for three years and rents their Cambridge house, the city (not they and their tenants) determines the monthly rent. The city even controls the length of the rental. Long after a lease has expired, a tenant may still be entitled to stay in your family's home indefinitely, which makes selling it very difficult, if not impossible...
...merit, but via "Reward for Rent-Controlled Apartment" posters on our streets. One current sign, for example, stuck in front of the Coop bookstore building, offers (on professionally printed, slick, self-stick paper) $1500 cash for information leading to a rentcontrolled apartment. This money is customarily paid to a tenant moving out, for introducing the reward payer to the landlord...
Proposition 1 says that if you have been a tenant in a rent-controlled apartment for two years, and if you wish to buy your home (and if your landlord wishes to sell it to you), you can do so. Under Proposition 1, you will not be required to buy. If you prefer, you can continue to rent forever at a low, rentcontrolled rent, just as you can now. But under Proposition 1, you will be given your choice...
Since you, the tenant, will be the only person in the world who can buy that rent-controlled apartment (your own home), you have unique bargaining power. Many landlords have indicated to me they would be happy to sell for about half-price (half of what the market price would be, were there no city restrictions...