February 12 - 19, 1998
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Last Thursday, a strange drama unfolded on the 14th floor of the Middlesex Superior Courthouse, in East Cambridge. A major Cambridge landlord, the Stu-Lin Realty Trust, was trying to evict a daycare teacher named Julia Gindele from her formerly rent-controlled studio apartment between Harvard and Porter Squares because she refused to pay a 50-percent hike in her monthly rent. Though such landlord-tenant disputes have been common since rent control was eliminated statewide in 1995, this one had a twist: Gindele's attorneys, Jeff Purcell and Jonathan Braun, were threatening to take her case before a jury. Losing control
Cambridge housing activists are still fighting. The battles may be valiant, but are they hopeless?
by Jason Gay
The idea of putting a rent control eviction case before a jury was intriguing, not to mention unprecedented for Cambridge. Jury trials for rent control disputes have only recently become an option; nobody was sure what would happen. On the street, rent control is a politically charged and emotional debate; in a courtroom, the rhetoric might have been comparatively subdued. But Cambridge housing activists, citing new studies showing how rent control's end has eroded the city's racial and economic diversity, hoped a verdict in Gindele's favor might send a message in support of less-affluent tenants. "I'd like to see what a jury makes of this," Bill Cavellini, a principal member of the Eviction Free Zone and the Campaign to Save 2000 Homes, two Cambridge housing activist groups, said Thursday morning.
But the trial never happened. At the last minute, Gindele's and Stu-Lin's attorneys hashed out an agreement allowing Gindele to stay in her apartment at a rent of $350 per month for another two years. The studio will then be returned to Stu-Lin Realty, which, presumably, will rent it at market value -- currently around $750 per month.
Gindele's supporters celebrated, saying she got a favorable deal from a tough landlord. Still, a unique chance to have rent control's impact debated by a jury was lost. "It's good for her," one activist said. "But the downside is we didn't get a trial and the verdict that the movement needed."
This kind of tradeoff is what Cambridge housing activism is about in 1998. The big battle -- rent control -- is lost. Today, the war has moved to new fronts: persuading the city to spend more money on affordable housing, finding ways of raising that money, and getting landlords to ease up on dramatic rent hikes. Without these measures, activists argue, long-time residents will continue to leave Cambridge, and the city's tradition of diversity will diminish.
But the tenant movement in Cambridge -- as in Boston -- is mostly a matter of fighting little battles for people like Julia Gindele. Claw a week here, scratch a month there, do a little picketing and shouting, and maybe you can keep a tenant in Cambridge another year. Activists are certain their influence keeps people in their homes. But, in this post-rent control era, can they make any long-term difference?
No matter what you think about rent control -- whether you think it's an integral protector of working-class and poor tenants, or an unfair shackle upon businesspeople seeking a fair return on their property -- there's no denying the consequences of its elimination. According to a recent study commissioned by Cambridge's Community Development Department, at least 38 percent of the people who lived in the city's approximately 14,500 rent-controlled units have moved since Question 9 was approved in November 1994. And 60 percent of those tenants have moved out of Cambridge entirely.
Predictably, as units have been decontrolled and rents have risen, Cambridge's character has changed. Residents are getting younger, whiter, and richer -- and more are coming from out of town. Sixty percent of people who have moved into decontrolled units in Cambridge have come from outside the city. Thirty percent of new households occupying decontrolled apartments include college or graduate students.
Veterans of the rent control war see these figures and say, We told you so. But getting rent control back is a fantasy, most agree. "Rent control is a dead doggie," says Robert Winters, who publishes an e-mail newsletter on the Cambridge political scene.
So the question becomes: How does a city without rent control preserve its diversity? In the past three years, Cambridge housing activists' priorities have shifted from rent control to affordable housing. The Eviction Free Zone, a collection of local housing activists, has spearheaded several ideas, including the Ten Million Dollar Plan, which called for the city to set aside $10 million of its post-rent control revenues to create more publicly owned, low-rent housing. Though the plan didn't take hold in its original form, it did stimulate City Hall to act: last year, Cambridge set aside nearly $5 million for affordable housing.
Another idea is a transfer tax, which would take a small cut (about 1 percent) of most Cambridge real estate transactions and put the money toward affordable housing. But this proposal may have a dim future; Acting Governor Paul Cellucci is adamantly opposed to transfer taxes, and a much-ballyhooed tax to buy open space on Cape Cod recently died at the ballot box. Activists are also urging the city's large landlords to cap rent hikes at 5 percent annually; though Harvard, the city's biggest private landlord, signed on to the idea (and even sold some of its properties to the city for affordable housing), it's unlikely that other large landlords, lacking Harvard's $11 billion endowment, will agree to any cap.
Because these larger battles are so problematic, the housing movement in Cambridge spends most of its time trying to keep the Julia Gindeles of the city in their apartments a little while longer. This involves more than a bit of rabble-rousing. By organizing tenants, taking a landlord to court, picketing his office, or publicizing an individual case before the city council, activists try to buy time. But this fight, too, is frustrating, because eventually, tenants who can't afford to pay market-value rents are doomed to get kicked out. "It wears people out tremendously," says Bill Marcotte, who, like many Cambridge housing activists, has struggled to stay in the city himself.
Gindele's case didn't stand out as the kind of rent control struggle that activists usually rally around. Young, white, single, and living in a desirable neighborhood, Gindele isn't the type that elicits a sympathetic response when activists discuss rent control's end. But her low income made her a "protected status" tenant -- meaning that she qualified for a two-year grace period from rent hikes after rent control was repealed. When that grace period ended in January 1996 and Stu-Lin hiked her rent 50 percent, Gindele decided not to pay it. She won support from the Eviction Free Zone and from the Campaign to Save 2000 Homes, which fights specifically for former protected-status tenants.
As the activists protested Gindele's eviction in the Cambridge streets (even picketing Stu-Lin's Mass Ave office), a pair of pro bono lawyers, Purcell and Braun, fought her case on the legal front. It's hard for a tenant to get a victory in court these days, says Braun, a 30-year-old attorney with a face so boyish he looks as if he should be tearing tickets at a multiplex. All moral arguing aside, the bottom line is that landlords today have the legal right to raise rents as much as they want -- and tenants who do not pay will be evicted. "It is the landlord's property," Braun says.
As a result, Braun and Purcell's modus operandi was delay, delay, delay -- take Gindele's case to court, ask for a jury trial to stretch out the process, raise issues with Stu-Lin's maintenance of the building, do everything possible to prevent eviction. This is a typical tactic among tenant advocates, and it's often effective. Purcell, who once served on Cambridge's rent control board, made no secret of his animus against Stu-Lin, and bragged that he could keep Gindele in her studio "for 10 years" by seeking delays.
But this was little sweat off the back of Stu-Lin Realty. The company's attorney, a tall, mop-haired counselor named Stuart Farkas, said the Gindele case was hardly a watershed for Stu-Lin. Why should it be? According to statistics compiled by the Eviction Free Zone, the estimated rent in Gindele's 60-unit building alone increased from $136,222 in 1994 to $502,170 -- a post-rent control jump of 269 percent. Julia or no Julia, Stu-Lin is rich and getting richer. (Despite this, Farkas had the chutzpah to suggest that large landlords remain "underdogs" in Cambridge.)
Gindele, who declined comment except to thank her lawyers, the Eviction Free Zone, and the Campaign to Save 2000 Homes, seemed satisfied with the outcome, as did the activists. "It's always going to be a balance between what's best for the individual and what's best for the group," said Cavellini. "In this case, we got a little bit of both."
But given Cambridge's post-rent control climate, this was the most Pyhrric of victories. Gindele's agreement merely postpones the inevitable; within two years, she's going to be driven out, like so many long-time residents before her, and Stu-Lin will get its market-value rent. Activists like to feel their small efforts are helping win a bigger battle; to them, tenant advocacy is not a lost cause. But rent control is over. And without a new strategy, there will be no way to stop the bleeding.
Jason Gay can be reached at jgay[a]phx.com.
