Jim O'Reilly, director of public affairs for the Greater Boston Real Estate Board (GBREB), estimates that from a pool of nearly 22,000 Boston residents in rent-controlled apartments, only about 800 have an income low enough to qualify them for protected status.

While he acknowledges that talk of evicted tenants is "sexy", he argues that such cases are only a small percentage of the whole. Most people, he says, can afford a small increase in their monthly rent.

Meanwhile, Cambridge Mayor Sheila Doyle Russell asserts that needy tenants were a minority of those living under rent control. "When we got down to the protected status tenants, they only got to be about 10 percent of rent-controlled apartments", she says. Russell adds that had tenant advocate groups been more flexible in 1994, a means-based system might have been enacted.

Russell says the debate was more about politics than helping the needy". They were not interested in protecting tenants, they were interested in protecting rent control".

Kennedy says the GBREB's numbers miss many needy renters because of a variety of factors including language barriers.

Regardless of the numbers produced by Kennedy or any other group, there are some indications that the process of gentrification may continue to escalate.

Tenant advocates insist that if scrapping rent-control regulations does not force low-income residents out of the city, escalating property values and the paucity of low income housing will