The Plot Sickens

Declared officially dead with the removal of rent controls last summer, the post-war housing shortage and its accompanying injustices were revived in a most irritating fashion at Harvard this September. A slow turnover of low-cost apartments, brimming Federal projects and the greatest enrollment in college history all combined to produce a large group of homeless and dissatisfied married veterans. In an effort to cope with this situation the Harvard Housing Trust instituted a strict priority system that temporarily placed veterans cut at Fort Devens or at the Hotel Branswick and gradually drew them into preferred quarters near the College. Ostensibly an inflexible program of unbiased seniority, this system was speedily replaced by a super priority list that allowed non-veteran faculty members to obtain an A-1 classification and receive prompt housing while 658 veteran students cooled their heels in the sticks.

Based on an obscure ruling that permits Colleges to place a five percent quota of non-veterans in its housing projects, the University dictum violates the entire purpose of Federal low-cost housing. In an inflationary period the 198 Cambridge and Boston units assigned Harvard represent a large percentage of the total number of apartments available to veterans living on their government allotments. The great majority of married veterans cannot compete for apartments on any but the lowest rent scale and Federal housing was designed to place decent living quarters within reach of their meager income. It seems grossly unfair that the University sees fit to allow a $10,000 per year faculty member a higher priority than the man for whom the project was intended.

No one will question the fact that these men are "essential to the College" or that they should have adequate housing. What does grate is the ease with which a full professor or a visiting lecturer displaces veterans who have been waiting six months or a year for permanent in-town housing. One visiting professor placed an application with the Harvard Housing Trust a year prior to his arrival in Cambridge. Classified A-1, the next vacancy was set aside for him and held until he took up residence here this fall. At the present time 525 students living at Fort Devens and in the Hotel Brunswick hold seniority over him, but stand little chance of moving into Jarvis or Andover Courts. The University knows the arrival date of new staff members well in advance and if it feels bound to provide housing for essential faculty, they should be given apartments in a rent bracket other than that assigned to veterans.