"If you look at any economic textbook, you'll see that this is a very destructive practice," Maddox says. "If you have rent control, there is not enough money going back into the building."

Harvard's Housing

Residents of both ideologies are eyeing the 700 apartments in the city owned by HPRE.

Preston says that the corporation's plan to turn the units into housing for graduate students could exacerbate the already contentious rent-control dilemma.

Last October, HPRE presented a plan to the city council which would sell 100 houses, reserve 94 units for needy tenants and make 70 units available to the city for affordable housing purposes.

"As [the units] become vacant, we plan to rent them out to Harvard affiliates," Speigelman says. "I don't see that as necessarily bad."

Speigelman says HPRE is balancing between its responsibility to the community and its need to consider the best interests of Harvard.

"We're trying to be a positive influence on the city of Cambridge," she says. "I'm trying to find the line in between, [but] we can't do everything.

But Duehay renewed his earlier objections to HPRE's proposal and predicts that "in the next few years, those with moderate means will find it impossible to rent in Cambridge."

Conservative Councillor Sheila T. Russell says that she felt rent control had some merits. But she says it was abolished because tenants refused to negotiate any reasonable modifications to the proposal.

"The tenants wouldn't change and now it's gone," she says. "There were a lot of people abusing the system."

Duehay and Russell both say that the city officials have been devising measures to combat the harshest effects of Question 9.

Easing the Transition

Cambridge Community Development (CCD) spent several months of 1995 devising pilot programs for low-income households who are having trouble affording the higher rents.

The programs are run by the city and paid for with $2 million in taxpayer funds.