Rent Hike Of 6 to 9% Seen Likely

Tenants in rent-controlled Cambridge apartments face rent increases of between 6 and 9 per cent a month beginning October 1, rent board officials said yesterday.

Peter Stanton, executive director of Cambridge's Rent Control Board, predicted the increase, designed to cover increased property taxes, would be between 6 and 8 per cent assuming the property tax rate increased $35 per thousand.

But the city manager's office said this week that a $45 tax rate increase was likely, a figure Stanton said would probably mean a 1 per cent increase in the rent adjustment.

Optimism

Stanton said he hoped "optimistically" to have the rent increase notices in the mail by the end of the month. If the notices reach landlords in time for them to give 30 days notice to their tenants, the increase will go into effect October 1. If not, the increases will wait until November.

Tenants spokesmen around the city said they felt the increase was fair. "We really can't complain," one member of the Alliance of Cambridge Tenants said.

The increase is the first of two which will be granted in 1980. The first covers tax payments, but the second will take into account inflation, particularly in the price of heating oil and electricity.

"It's too early to predict what the second increase will be, or when it will come, although we should get it out in 1980," Stanton said. Tenant leaders in the city have said in recent months that a general increase of more than 10 per cent would be "unacceptable."

Harvard officials have requested "at least a 10.5 per cent increase" in the general adjustment, Sally Zeckhauser, president of Harvard Real Estate, said yesterday.

"Fuel costs could go out of sight and landlords would need more than that," Zeckhauser added.

The second adjustment is "enormously much more complicated than the tax-based increase," Stanton said, adding that it was far too early to tell how big the jump would be.

"We know oil prices have gone up from 85 cents to a dollar a gallon and more since the last adjustment, for example," Stanton said.

Stanton did say, however, that the increase would "absolutely" be less than the general adjustment granted last year, when landlords, complaining that rates had been fixed for several years, were allowed a 9.5 per cent increase plus much larger hikes that took into account individual fuel costs.

Under the city's rent control act, landlords can only increase rents with the approval of the city's rent board. Some landlords are given "special adjustments" for capital improvements to their buildings or other large expenses