Housing Crisis

Faculty and married students must already balance the advantages of Harvard against the disadvantages of city life--in the form of bad housing bad schools, impassable traffic, poor health, high delinquency, high taxes, and poor public services. Harvard's attraction is often insufficient, and valuable talent goes elsewhere.

Those who choose Harvard must also choose between living in Cambridge and commuting from the more congenial suburbs. More and more often, family orientation dominates, and the "academic community" becomes a myth. "The staff" is on the job from nine to five, and then retires to its separate homes, safe from the Square for another 16 hours.

The picture is not a pleasant one; there are few men willing to argue that a Boston version of NYU is a desirable end. In the face of this trend, the University has three alternatives: ignore the situation, adapt to it, or try to change it.

While ignoring the trend may appear ludicrous, it is all too natural. The tendency to call Harvard an educational institution and let education end at the classroom door is strong, especially when a partial solution for undergraduates has been found in the House system.

On the other hand, the teacher shortage makes such a position tenuous. It is hard enough to find good teachers. Inducing them to live in slums is next to impossible. The University has already made tentative efforts at providing housing for faculty and married students, and hopes to do more. Likewise, the school problem could perhaps be solved either by experimental classes operated by the School of Education, or by raising salaries enough to pay for private education.

But even these changes cannot completely counteract the overall metropolitan pattern. Most people do not want to live in a slum even when their own home is a palace. The only alternative is to attack the existing pattern, trying to develop a new pattern through Urban Renewal.

The need for such an effort is made dramatically clear by the existing conditions:

One house in five rents for less than $25 a month, which, according to the Corcoran Report, "provides a cold-water, stove-heated flat in a substandard pre-1900 building which the landlord cannot afford to maintain." More than one house in three lacks central heating. One house in four is classified as "dilapidated" by the city. 16,000 of the 33,000 Cambridge homes are either threatened by, or engulfed in, blight.

Half of the houses in Cambridge were built before 1900. Such buildings need, but do not get, continual maintainance and renovation if they are to provide safe, healthy homes. Yet at the present rate of replacement, the last will be torn down in 2380.

The school situation is no better. Cambridge High and Latin enrollment has dropped 32 percent in the last ten years. Four out of ten children born in Cambridge to local parents will be attending a non-Cambridge school by the end of elementary school. Of those who graduate from one of the two local high schools, fewer than one in three will go on to college.

Traffic Troubles

Traffic patterns, laid out in 1840 when Cambridge had 6500 residents and Longfellow was inspired to write about the spreading chestnut tree, are today hopelessly inadequate. There are 33,000 registered motor vehicles. There are another 5,000 University-registered cars, and many more unregistered or indirectly connected with the University. Both numbers are growing daily.

Added to the local problem are the hundreds of thousands of commuters who pour through Cambridge streets daily, often clogging them further by parking and taking the subway to work. Co-ordination between state, metropolitan and local authorities on rerouting this through traffic has been halting at best, and more often non-existent.

Despite this situation, the city has no traffic director. Having trained a member of the police department for the job, the city tied itself in civil service knots, and cannot appoint him. The only consolation is that, if appointed, he would have no power anyhow.