(This is the first in a series of three articles. Part II will appear tomorrow, and Part III, a photo feature, on Saturday.)

LAST FEBRUARY, 182 tenants of Harvard-owned housing near the Medical School in Roxbury received notice that their homes were to be demolished to make way for construction of the Affiliated Hospitals Center. About three-quarters were told that they would have to vacate by April 1971: the rest, that they had to leave by January 1974.

Then, in April, the SDS occupiers of University Hall demanded that the University cancel the evictions of these tenants, whose apartments they alleged Harvard was "planning to tear down to expand its Medical School facilities in Boston."

Housing conditions in these apartments had deteriorated badly in the months preceding the April demonstrations. As Medical School administrators later acknowledged, maintenance had been extremely deficient, and a large number of safety hazards had been left unrepaired. Some tenants had even been forced to leave their apartments when maintenance surveys revealed violations of municipal housing codes. Tenant eviction in the medical area had already begun.

SDS was incorrupt in asserting that the Affiliated Hospitals Center (AHC) would be a University-owned facility. The AHC is a collective enterprise of tee's decisions. But the committee was given no definitive powers, and Ebert ruled at the outset that it could not place under reconsideration the projected location of the AHC itself.

There were three empty tracts of Harvard-owned land in the vicinity of the Med School on which the AHC could conceivably have been located. But the housing site was selected for the AHC for two reasons: the need to reuse some of the existing Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, and what Richard D. Wittrup, now executive vice president of the AHC, called "internal relations within the medical complex."

AFTER choosing the site, the AHC assumed responsibility for relocating displaced tenants and was engaged in preliminary planning for new housing units. But within days of the University Hall occupation there occurred a transfer of this responsibility and Harvard took charge of the task. As the Fein Committee began its proceedings in late April, the University pledged that there would be no evictions until it had built new housing at comparable rents and in nearby areas.

On May 6, the Corporation announced that Harvard would build 1100 low and moderate income housing units in the medical area to alleviate the housing shortage caused by construction of the AHC. But contracting an architect and developer, producing federal subsidies for the low-income portion of the housing, S. Gruson, assistant to the President for Community Affairs, first appeared before the committee on May 12, the plans had already been made. Neither was the AHC site a subject of the committee's deliberations. Despite numerous objections by committee members, and a petition signed by over two-thirds of all first-year medical students, Fein ruled that the site question was beyond the committee's purview.

Nor were any of these decisions made in consultation with affected tenants. There were no provisions for tenant representation on the AHC governing board, and even the question of community membership on the Fein Committee was a point of sharp contention. Only after extensive debate within the committee (including, at one point, a discussion of whether the affected area fit the definitions of "community" and "neighborhood"), were representatives of five community organizations invited to join. Tenants and others in the area later worked in sub-committees and task forces as directed by the committee, but their effectiveness was limited by the narrow decision-making bounds within which the committee itself was made to work.

The AHC's decision to move the hospital site bore only an incidental relation to the fact that original plans called for the destruction of large numbers of homes. Conceivably, this decision might have been made on the grounds that many families would otherwise have been displaced, and that the subsequent loss of low-income housing would have constricted an already tight housing market. Going a step further, the decision could have been made in consultation with the tenants themselves. Neither of these things was done.

HOSPITAL construction is now planned for a site on which there is no housing, but there is every indication that much of the original site will still be taken. The AHC now maintains a permanent option on an area which contains one-third of the endangered homes. F. Stanton Deland, Jr. '36, president of the AHC and a Harvard Overseer, stated recently that if the AHC finds no use for the land in three years' time, the option will revert back to the University, and possibly from the University to other medical agencies.

And, despite Harvard's assurances to the tenants that the first evictions have been postponed until 1973, the original eviction notices have not yet been cancelled.

The University did not act on a recommendation of the Fein Committee that maintenance be undertaken in deteriorated apartments. A subcommittee survey revealed that over half of the tenants contacted felt that maintenance had been unsatisfactory. The committee ruled in June that the housing "be reasonably improved and maintained at Harvard's expense and in any event that steps be taken to eliminate hazards." Yet six months later, Stephen J. Miller, associate dean for Urban Affairs at the Med School, acknowledged, "Yes, maintainence has been-what do I want to say-lousy."

Conditions resulting from poor maintenance have been treacherous. During a rainstorm last November, leaking water dripped onto electric wires and caused a fire in a building which houses seven adults and eleven children. In another apartment, rented by a 79-year-old man and his wife, one radiator leaks and another has not worked, he said, "for a couple of years." In a third building, many of whose apartments tenants claim Harvard has sought to vacate rather than fix a broken boiler, one woman lived without heat for three months last fall. Tenants have complained about many other maintenance problems.

Nor did Harvard implement a committee recommendation that all vacant apartments in the endangered area be immediately rented. In previous months, it had been Harvard's policy to rent apartments primarily to students, interns, and other transients to case the process of eviction. In July, the committee ruled that apartments should be rented to families only. In October, the ruling was clarified as a rental policy which gave priority to families.