City Rent Board to Rule Today on 7 Sumner Rd.

The city's Rent Control Board is expected to give its final verdict tonight on the University's two-year-old attempt to evict tenants from 7 Sumner Rd. and convert the property into office space for the Graduate School of Design.

The five-member Rent Board will probably vote on whether to grant Harvard the "removal permit" necessary to remove the four-story brick apartment building from the rental market.

Although observers said they cannot predict the outcome, they added that board members will pay special attention to a report by a city hearing examiner that recommends denying the University request.

Cheap Rents

The hearing examiner, Margaret Turner, stated in two reports that the removal of the 16-unit apartment building would aggravate Cambridge's shortage of housing. Her report also rejected Harvard's argument that because it had "created" other rental units, it should be allowed to remove the one property.

Lawyers for both sides said yesterday that they will consider appealing the rent board decision.

"Both sides always have the possibility of appeal--I want to see what the board does," Saul Schapiro, an attorney for the tenants in the building, said yesterday.

"We don't want to make these decisions until we're faced with those problems," Louis Armistead, Harvard's vice-president for government and community affairs, said yesterday.

The board sent the Sumner Rd. case back for further examination early this fall, and a vote scheduled for last month was postponed when one board member was unable to attend the session.

Neighborhood activists have termed the case a major test of community-University relations. "It has become a symbol to people in the neighborhoods," City Councilor David Sullivan said recently.

It is also a major test of the city's removal ordinance, which is slightly more than a year old. Designed primarily to thwart condominium developers, the ordinance requires board approval before taking a rent-controlled property off the rental market.

If Harvard loses before the board and appeals the case to district court, it might challenge the entire removal ordinance as an unconstitutional confiscation of property, a possibility that has worried some city officials, sources in the rent control department said yesterday.