Rent Control Not Helped by CTU

Our city councillors deserve the highest commendation from all of us. They kept rent control in place for years in spite of the anti-tenant situation at the highest level of the Cambridge "Tenants" Union (CTU). Those city councillors are to be commended and cherished for their accomplishment.

The situation in the CTU is so bad that twice during the closing days of the referendum, CTU was represented to the Cambridge City Council by a person who has no business in a tenant organization or in acting as the principal representative of Cambridge tenants.

This person had been the most visible officer of a landlord corporation that spent $180,000 trying to crush the rent control rights of its tenants. The corporations attack on its tenants were so unpopular that the corporations stopped electing directors for years because the people who controlled the corporation feared that new directors, once elected, would stop its attacks on its tenants.

This "tenant leader" loudly fights any tenant organization working for policy that defends any tenant whose interests are not identical to his. He is joined by fellow "tenant leaders" who are equally anti-tenant except for tenants whose interests are identical to theirs.

The situation in the Cambridge "Tenants" Union is so bad that its "tenant leaders" have called it "antitenant" to work both to defend their homes. They have called it "anti-tenant" to defend tenants of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. They have called it "anti-ten-ant" to defend rent control tenants who lacked condominium eviction rights.

These "tenant leaders" sat on their hands for years while the Rent Control Board considered proposal after proposal to harm rooming-house tenants, the weakest of the weak.

These "tenant leaders" offer various excuses for their anti-tenant behavior. The excuses change even more often than do the names of their front organizations. Their antitenant behavior, however, never changes; only the excuses do. It is not surprising that we finally lost our protections. Bob La Tremouille   Cambridge, Massachusetts