Cambridge 1983?

CITY COUNCIL CANDIDATE Alice Wolf used someone's picture without authorization on one of her campaign leaflets, so her workers had to spend a few days rectifying the error with black crayon. And there was an unsigned leaflet attacking incumbent councilor David Sullivan in language safely described as strong. But not much more; considering the history of the city's political campaigns, it's been a placid fall. In fact, only one image really stands out: council candidate Wendy Abt, a stunned look on her face, fighting back tears after the Rent Control Task Force convention denied her its endorsement by an overwhelming vote. The non-endorsement may say quite a lot about where Cambridge politics is headed in the years to come; at the very least, it is a fascinating commentary on the politics of style.

To set the scene, Abt is an ambitious liberal campaigner who has never held public office. Two years ago, she ran for the state Senate and managed to anger a lot of the city's progressive organizers by refusing to join forces in a single-minded coalition against conservative incumbent Francis McCann. She lost. This year, she's making her first bid for the city council, and she won, with no fuss at all, the support of the liberal Cambridge Civic Association (CCA). She appeared--and still appears--to have a good shot at winning a seat on the nine-member panel. A tireless campaigner, she has probably shaken as many hands as any candidates save the Sullivans, Walter and David. But despite her avowed support for rent control and opposition to condominium conversion. Abt got only three votes at the tenant convention; more than 100 activists voted against her, and she was the only candidate in attendance to be defeated. She was, she said, "shocked."

But she shouldn't have been. Most everyone else at the convention knew Abt wouldn't be endorsed, though few expected she would receive so little support. Lots of reasons underlie the disenchantment with Abt, including the old grudge about her personal ambition and independence during the state Senate fight. Several causes, though, are more important than the rest, for they lead to the inescapable conclusion that there is more to this story than one person's foibles and that Cambridge politics is changing and changing fast.

Abt's greatest crime, in the eyes of tenant organizers, seems to be equivocation. Though she swore never to vote against rent control, she presented a set of five problems with the program in her speech to the convention. And she said this: "Some sympathetic observers have pointed out that rent control may not be the best or the only way to protect low and moderate income people...Without better data, it is impossible to insist on rent control and condo controls in exactly their current forms." Saying that to a room full of tenant activists was not wise; better for a fundamentalist preacher to tell his flock that the whale didn't really swallow Jonah. Enacting rent control in 1970 was a tremendous struggle; maintaining it since then has been just as hard. And tenants have to look no farther than Somerville--where rents doubled and tripled when rent control was wiped off the books 18 months ago--to realize how important the program is to their future in Cambridge. Liberal politicians have deserted rent control in the past, and so tenant activists demand nothing less than clear-cut rhetoric. Here, for example, is what challenger John St. George--endorsed unanimously--told the convention: "I will consider no matter more pressing than the need to preserve and strengthen rent control."

On Brattle St., though, they may be thinking a little differently. West Cambridge has always been the power base of city liberals; it's here that the CCA finds the bulk of its votes, and it's here that Abt and others like her must do well to win seats on the council. For a long time, this area was the home of "good government" sentiment. The Brattle St. folk, distressed at the fashion which the Irish pols were running the city, formed the CCA in the 1940s, and for a long time the organization was dominated by a sort of Yankee Republicanism, distinguished by a distaste for corruption and a desire for efficiency. With the turbulence of the Vietnam era, that changed. The swing leftward on national issues among the well-to-do, especially the academic well-to-do, translated on the local level into support for rent control and other programs designed to aid the poor. All of a sudden, having a diverse city was as important as a clean city or an efficiently managed city.

The thing about pendulums, though, is that they always swing back. There are signs that the CCA romance with the left--with the city's disadvantaged--may be fading. Or perhaps it is not so much the CCA itself, for its platform still expressed unequivocal support for rent control and limits on condominium conversion. The change instead may be with the traditional CCA voters, and if their mood is shifting, then most likely the organization will quickly scurry to the right. Increasingly, Brattle St. voters seem more worried about issues that affect them--tax assessments are the prime example--than about issues that affect others--rent control, for instance. And it seems inevitable that if conservatism, neo or otherwise, becomes more popular at Harvard and other local breeding grounds of intellectual fashion, then conservatism will eventually trickle down to the local level, just as the radicalism of the late '60s influenced the members of the city council.

A SHIFT TO THE RIGHT may take a while to affect housing issues, for a homeowner can support rent control without direct cost. But an increasingly large percentage of the city's elite dwell in condominiums, and it is at least possible that out of a sense of identification, they will support the right of others to purchase their apartments, a right denied under existing city legislation designed to protect the city's rental housing stock. A test of condo owner sentiments will be support for Mary Allen Wilkes in the November election. A former CCA member, Wilkes now is billed as the "condo candidate," and has spoken out in favor of removing restrictions on the right of tenants to buy their apartments. Though she is given little chance of winning a seat at this time, her vote total will be important, and if she does well, the CCA may take steps to shore up support in future elections.

Restrictions on condominium conversion were adopted two years ago; they are crucial, for without them rent control is all but meaningless. The pressure on the city's housing market is great enough that within a decade, most forecasters conclude, the bulk of city apartments would have become condominiums. Rents might still be controlled, but very few people would be paying them. And so the dispute over condo conversion seems the likeliest battleground for tenants and developers to fight it out. For the ideological reasons outlined above, large parts of the traditional CCA constituency may become supporters of the developers; if they do, the pressures on CCA candidates may become enormous. The demands of tenant activists will have to be compromised with the demands of the moderate elite for a "reasoned approach" a la Abt. The pulling from both sides could, in future years, rip candidates like Francis H. Duehay '55 and David Wylie right in half.

After all, there are few ties besides ideology that bind the CCA and the leftist tenant movement. One is predominantly rich and white; the other includes many lower and middle income residents, and many Blacks and Hispanics. One is fashionable; the other isn't. (Abt, dressed to the nines, looked distinctly out of place amid the blue jeans that dominated the tenant forum.) And when the CCA is liberal, it is because its members are looking out for others. The tenants will stay radical; they're looking out for themselves. Even the bridges between the two groups are tenuous. Though David Sullivan led all CCA candidates at the polls two years ago, there were more than a few people accusing him of going to extremes when he tried to tighten the condo restrictions this spring.

For at least one more election, the tenuous coalition between liberal and radical, between the CCA and the' tenants, seems likely to last. But it is hard not to look at what happened to Wendy Abt and conclude that a deep rift between the two groups is possible, and that Cambridge politics--traditionally polarized between neighborhood-oriented Independents and the CCA--could become split up among the Independents, the CCA and the tenants.