4 Off-Campus Students, Landlord Fight Against Housing Regulation

Four off-campus Harvard students and their landlord fought before the Cambridge Board of Appeals yesterday to keep their Greenough St.house--and a fifth, non-Harvard roommate.

The City Zoning Board had charged last March that the landlord, Gerald S. Fogelman, was violating a seldom-enforced City regulation which insists on a boarding room license for any house rented to more than four people who are not related by blood.

In an interview before the hearing, Fogelman stated that complaints from neighbors had prompted the City to send inspectors to the house. While ostensibly looking for electrical defects, they asked how many boys lived there, Fogelson said.

But at the hearing a member of the Board of Appeals made clear that Harvard usually requests the Cambridge Building Board to examine all apartments on the school's student housing list.

The four Harvard students have all worked at Wellmet, a halfway house for mental patients, and sometime have patients over for dinner. Their fifth room-mate is a former mental patient, who has held a steady job at the M.I.T. Coop for the last two years. In interviews all neighbors at the hearing denied objecting to the students' connections with Wellmet.

But Fogelman alleged that street residents had complained to the owners that "we were ruining their neighborhood by bringing in mentally ill, or crazy people, and students who were odd-looking and beatniks of strange appearance."

Delay

The Board of Appeals suspended any decision on the matter yesterday until technicalities over Fogelman's landlord-ship could be ascertained. The house is actually owned by a trust which leases to Fogelman, and he had no written proof that he represented the actual owners.

But despite the technical delay, residents and students were allowed to voice their criticisms. Some residents felt "college kids take advantage of the City without adding anything," and were "tired of these students carrying on." Other neighbors just objected to the general tenor of the transient population, rather than the boys personally.