Residents Ask Moratorium On Expansion of Institutions

Residents of the neighborhood surrounding Lesley College filed a petition with the city clerk yesterday requesting a temporary moratorium on the growth of religious and educational institutions.

The Cambridge City Council last night sent the petition, prompted by the recent purchase of several homes by Lesley College, to the Planning Board for a hearing.

Signed by more than a dozen residents in the Wendell, Mellon and Oxford St. area, the petition calls for "a temporary moratorium on conversion of residential structures to educational and religious uses...to provide time for the city to implement" permanent regulations on the use of institutional property.

These regulations will be ready for a city council vote by February, community development officials said yesterday.

The Other Side

Lesley College officials denounced the moratorium yesterday. They are planning to turn a two-family house into student housing early this summer, and a moratorium "could cause us real problems in the early stages" of the job, Robert Lewis, executive vice president of the college, said yesterday.

The moratorium specifically exempts Harvard, which is protected under the state constitution from most forms of local regulation.

Despite the exemption, some city leaders yesterday called upon Harvard to follow the guidelines of the moratorium voluntarily if it is adopted.

"I think that it is too early for us to take any kind of position on that," Lewis A. Armistead, acting assistant vice president for government and community affairs, said yesterday.

The moratorium petition will go to the city planning board for final consideration. If the moratorium is accepted, building permits granted between the time of its adoption by the council and the planning board vote will not protect developers.

Ken Basler, an area resident and one of the signers of the petition, said "Lesley has been known to move very fast. We just wanted to make sure we had protection between now and the time a permanent ordinance is adopted."

the city council originally asked that the ordinance be prepared by the end of this year, but city planners "wanted to take it very slowly and carefully," Donald Balcom, who is drafting the law for the city's development department, said yesterday.

Good Sense

"This case strikes me as a sensible use of the moratorium," Balcom said, adding that institutional purchases around the city may have increased with the new ordinance on the horizon.