PBH Will Enter Inner Belt Fight

Departing from the PBH tradition of acting only as a social service organization, the cabinet of Philips Brooks House has unanimously voted to create a Student Committee on the Inner Belt.

According to Peter B. Rosenbaum '67, president of PBH, the committee is designed as an experiment to study ways that both PBH and the Harvard community can learn to take a stand on vital local issues.

The cabinet has taken a position against construction of the Inner Belt. "Ideally, the people involved should have been consulted before the plans were made, and if this was impossible, relocation of families should at least have been discussed as an issue," said Rosenbaum.

The committee will probably first attempt to mobilize faculty and student opposition to the Belt itself, or exert pressure for an alternate to the present Brookline-Elm St. route, which may displace as many as 1500 families. If this is impossible, however, they will work to find housing elsewhere for displaced families.

Joint Action

Thomas L. Dublin '67 and David B. Palley '68, provisional co-chairmen, hope the committee will be able to arouse enough interest at Harvard so that workers can be sent to mobilize areas along the Belt which have not been organized as yet. Much of the committee's work will probably involve joint action with groups like the Cambridge mothers who staged a sit-in at M.I.T., November 2.

Until the organizational meeting which will be held sometime after Thanksgiving, however, the PBH cabinet considers all plans of action extremely tentative.

The decision on the Inner Belt from the State Department of Public Works is expected within a month.