JUST WHEN Harvard students began flowing back into Cambridge last September, a group of about 800 Cambridge residents, many of them elderly, met for a day in a stuffy church auditorium halfway across the City. This assembly, which dubbed itself the Cambridge Housing Convention, passed a slew of resolutions asking just about everyone in the City--in the universities, the City government, the local redevelopment authority, etc--to do something about what has become Cambridge's most pressing problem: a chronic shortage of low-income housing.
Though the housing convention's resolutions were aimed in all directions, much of the anger expressed at the meeting flew straight toward the universities. In one of his finer moments. Harvard's old nemesis, City Councillor Alfred E. Vellucci of East Cambridge, called not only for low-income housing, but also for a program which would "send Harvard and M.I.T. packing across the river." Through the members of the audience were tired after hours of such speech making, they roused themselves, and gave Vellucci thunderous applause.
That they did is not surprising, for much of the City's housing shortage is directly or indirectly due to the presence of the universities. Acting like giant magnets, they draw new customers--graduate students, professional people, and hangers-on who wish to be near the universities--into the City's housing market. This year, 4020 Harvard students alone lived off-campus in Cambridge; the number of others who moved to the City because of the universities is unknown, but it probably ranges in the thousands. In this densely developed city, the supply of housing has lagged behind this increase in demand, and rents have, if not soared, at least risen to levels beyond the reach of the older, less affluent residents of the City.
The "housing crisis" per se is not particularly new; sharply rising rents have plagued Cambridge for years. But housing shortages only became a major public issue this fall--after the Cambridge Economic Opportunity Committee took a survey of the elderly in Cambridge, found that 57 per cent of those surveyed were paying more than half their income for rents, and then proceeded to organize the Cambridge Housing Convention session.
Since that session, housing has remained a live issue, with both existing and newly-formed community groups holding meetings, issuing statements, and lobbying with government organizations for more low-income housing. This flurry of activity within the community--and the reverberations which it has had within the University itself--has moved institutional Harvard toward a greater concern for alleviating Cambridge's housing problems.
The Corporation's statement on May 5 that it would build 1100 housing units, 30 per cent of them low income, in Boston and undertake a similar program of housing construction in Cambridge marked a significant change with past attitudes toward community issues. Previously, Harvard--as an institution--had more or less stood aloof from the community; what assistance it gave to Cambridge and Boston came largely as a by product of the research projects of individual faculty members or through the initiative of student social service organizations such as Phillips Brooks House.
Changing past community policies--or lack of policies--of the University has been a slow process. Throughout the fall, Harvard (and M.I.T.) administrators met with a committee created by the Cambridge Housing Convention. At the meeting, the Housing Convention members demanded that the universities immediately commit themselves to a sweeping program of housing, while University representatives suggested beginning with projects that were immediately feasible. The meetings ended without any substantial progress.
In January, the Wilson Committee report on the University and the City recommended that Harvard actively work to case the pressure on Cambridge housing--primarily by building more housing for University personnel and secondarily by sponsoring low-income housing projects in Cambridge. At the same time, the report strongly urged Harvard to revamp its administrative structure for community affairs--in order to create a clear route for bringing community claims into the decision-making structure.
The committee's report evoked little response from within the Harvard administration--and even less from the Harvard students and faculty. The widespread debate on University-community relations which the committee had hoped its report would initiate never occurred. Pre-occupied with academic concerns, students and Faculty allowed the report to slip into semi-oblivion. Just before spring break, committee chairman James Q. Wilson told a meager audience of 26 people at the Ed School that the committee had been "naive" in expecting to rouse the University over community issues. "We addressed ourselves to everybody in general and nobody in particular," he said, lamenting the report's seeming demise.
Three weeks later, as the April crisis hit Harvard, a widespread debate over University-community relations finally occurred. Through "University expansion," as it came to be called, was much less discussed than ROTC, and much of the discussion of community issues was confused and rhetoric laden, it nevertheless was the first time in memory, and probably in the history of the University, that any substantial number of people had stopped to give any thought whatsoever to the relationship between Harvard and the communities which surround her.
Virtually all those who participated in the debates on Harvard's role in the community agreed that improvements were needed, but there were sharp divergences of opinion over just what Harvard was doing in Cambridge, and what it should be doing. As might be expected, the biggest split was between the SDS petition, and the stands of those outside of SDS. Among the non-SDS groups, a rough consensus existed on, at least, the general direction which future Harvard action in the community should take toward reimbursing Cambridge and Boston for the side-effects of University expansion, primarily by supporting the construction of low-income housing units. The most fervent supporters of this course of action were a group of activist city planners in the Design School, who earlier in the year had provided technical advice to the Cambridge Housing Convention. Their demands--which called for the construction by Harvard of 3000 housing units, half of them low-income, in the community--were endorsed by the mass meeting at Soldiers Field.
The GSD program for low-income housing in Cambridge and Boston came under strong attack from SDS, which argued that rend increases were not unintentional by-products of the University's presence in Cambridge, but rather part of a concerted action by the Universities, the Federal government, and the Cambridge City government to drive "working people" out of Cambridge and transform the City into a complex of defense-oriented industries. Because of this expansion cabal, SDS argued, any housing duced by the universities or local government would not be low-income but rather moderate and high-income, to house the technicians who would work in the plants of "Imperial City."
The suggested action which SDS derived from its analysis was simple: build an alliance between workers and students to stop all expansion by the universities, NASA, and research industries in Cambridge. As the SDS pamphlet, Harvard, Urban Imperialist, put it:
The demand to end Harvard's expansion refers both to the kind of expansion it is facilitating--the development of a community centered around military, corporate, and U. S. government priorities--and to the destruction of working class neighborhoods. Workers' interests are being attacked in two ways: both through the broad policies in which Harvard is instrumental, and through rent increases and the destruction of workers' housing.
This position was basically the work of the Workers Student Alliance with in SDS, and had been adopted by the organization as a whole only after a stiff fight with an opposition position calling for construction of low-income housing.
