Rent control--the affordable housing plan which provoked bitter debates and divided Cambridge for 25 years--is gone.

Rent control was repealed by a statewide referendum which fully took effect January 1. Municipal elections will no longer pivot around the issue.

The politicians, pundits and polemicists now have turned their attention towards arguing about what might be the far-reaching consequences of its repeal.

"It will press people to the edge of homelessness," says Michael H. Turk, chair of the Cambridge Tenants' Union (CTU), a pro-rent faction.

But Jon R. Maddox, the author of Question 9--the November 1994 state ballot initiative which repealed rent control--denounces the former policy as "welfare for the rich."

"The poor don't have enough savvy to take advantage of it," Maddox says.

'Living Like Felons'

Maddox says was forced to write Question 9 because the Cambridge City Council was out of control.

He says the council ordered Maddox to rent out his condominium for $300 per month, a figure he estimates was $400 below market value.

With the support of the city's Small Property Owners Association (SPOA), Maddox drafted Question 9 in response.

"People were living like felons," he says. "[They] changed their phone numbers, took their names off the doors...".

Maddox, a local attorney, talks with special pride of the 70,286 petition signatures which he collected throughout the state--a mere 34 signatures more than the legal requirement.

After a campaign where citizens on both sides spent millions of dollars, the state-wide ballot initiative passed by several thousand votes, although 55 percent of Cambridge voters opposed it.

Chapter 282

Question 9 took effect January 1. But the state legislature's passage of Chapter 282 soon afterward assured that rents for those deemed "needy" by the city's rent control board would rise gradually, until the program was fully eliminated this December.