Because they were unable to navigate the intricate web of city and state housing regulations, the Bolognas are facing a $150,000 settlement in favor of their tenants and $95,000 in legal fees.

While this debt forced them into personal bankruptcy, the Bolognas are now moving on with their life.

"We're lucky because we're young and we can still pick up the pieces and go on with this," Vinnie Bologna says.

Just as it allowed their own family to rebuild, the Bolognas feel that the demise of rent control has an equally positive effect on Cambridge.

Their own Harvard Street neighborhood is buzzing with contractors's pickups coming in and out of driveways, rotten wood getting torn off roofs and air-powered hammer-guns lining up rows of shingles.

"For the past two years, all the people have been trying to fix up their houses," Vinnie Bologna says. "The community looks better. Construction is everywhere. People take more pride in their property."

Both Laura and Vinnie acknowledge that these changes may force people to move out of the city.

But they don't see anything wrong with that. From their perspective, a family should live where it can afford to.

Both feel that only a small minority of rent-control recipients will be forced to move out of the city as their rent goes up.

They believe that those few evictions could have been avoided with a more efficient rent control system, including means test. RENT CONTROL

Currently there are very few research efforts to document the changes faced by the communities that lost rent control.

Professor of Law Duncan M. Kennedy '64, an expert in housing law and policy, is one of the area's few academics following the issue closely.

A Cambridge resident, Kennedy is currently supervising a series of independent studies by third-year Harvard Law School students that focuses on rent increases and eviction levels in Boston, Brookline and Cambridge in order to get an idea of the social consequences of rent control's repeal.

Although the Law School professor was unable to release the most recent Cambridge study, he said it appears that low-income Catagbragians are in the process of getting weeded out.

"The remaining class and ethnic diversity of the Cambridge area will be significant reduced in the next 18 months to two years, given the current tightness of the Cambridge housing market and given the longterm push toward gentrification," Kennedy said.

Those projections do not agree with separate estimates produced by landlord advocates.