Tenants Committee Fights Rent Hikes With a Law Suit

The Cambridge Tenants Organizing Committee (CTOC) will file a class action suit against the Cambridge Rent Control Board's recent decision permitting landlords to raise rents by as much as 20 per cent, members of the committee said yesterday.

CTOC will file the suit sometime before April 1, the date the increases become legal, Mark Goldowitz, a lawyer on its legal committee, announced yesterday.

The suit follows a vote by more than 500 Cambridge tenants last Sunday not to pay the rent increases.

No Strike Yet

At the CTOC-sponsored meeting, the tenants rejected a motion for a complete rent strike but decided to reconsider the question after judging their success at withholding only the increase in their rents.

Members of the Rent Control Board said last week that on the average, rents will rise between 10 and 20 per cent after April 1.

They said they made the decision to allow the hikes because of inflationary jumps in the city's tax rate, the cost of living, and the price of fuel.

Speakers at the tenants' meeting, however, said the increases would hurt tenants more than inflation was hurting the landlords.

Paul Watkins, a landlord member of the Rent Control Board, said last night he did not think the CTOC's suit would succeed.

"It won't come to much. They're saying they'll sue the board for doing exactly what it is supposed to do," he said.

Watkins added that the board was "very careful" to make sure that each rent increase corresponded closely to each landlord's specific increases in taxes and fuel costs.

Members of the CTOC's legal committee refused last night to comment on the specifics of their suit.

CTOC members said yesterday they were hopeful that their withholding action combined with the threat of a rent strike would bring sufficient pressure on the landlords to block the rent increases.

"There may be a lot of eviction proceedings and a lot of physical blocking of eviction proceedings," Richard Traina, a CTOC member, said. "That will throw everything back to the courts, and they just won't be able to handle that load.