Get Off the Tightrope

ALTHOUGH HE won't admit it. Cambridge Mayor Alfred E. Vellucci is walking a political tightrope between conservatives and liberals over city housing policy. But for Vellucci and thousands of tenants in rent-controlled housing, there is no adequate safety net to insure against a hasty sidestep

Traditionally supporting the liberal Cambridge Civic Association (CCA) on housing issues, but having won the Mayor's chair in January on the basis of conservative Independent support, Vellucci now seems confused about where he should lend his crucial swing vote on the divided council. Seems, however, is the key word here.

Vellucci managed to dominate the council's last two year term and climbed to the mayoralty this session precisely because of the way he straddled the fence between Independents and the CCA over the hottest political issue in the city. Though Vellucci more than anyone is responsible for the city's housing guidelines, he never staked out a clear position on the issue of whether Cambridge should weaken its tough controls against condominium conversion. Those controls protect rent-controlled housing from the open market forces that would transform them into luxury condos

For a few minutes Monday night. Vellucci seemed to have finally made up his mind to abandon his strategy of using condos for political capital "I ask my colleagues on the council to take their condominium amendments and hold them until another day," he said. The condo debate, Vellucci explained, had hundred discussion of more pressing matters.

But before the end of the night. Vellucci showed that the condo debate has proved too beneficial to his own political fortunes to abandon it so abruptly. The Mayor introduced a resolution to allow a group of Linnean St and Washington Ave tenants to own and occupy their apartments as condos "unhindered by rules or regulations of the city." Thus, he reopened a case of disputed condo conversion on which conservatives campaigning for the council had focused their rhetoric back in November.

Vellucci's repeated wobbling on the Linnaean and Washington case shows just how his tightrope stance hurts both tenants and would-be condo owners cross the city. By first signalling that he would make exemptions to the condo codes, then refusing to amend them, and then moving again to loosen the regulations. Vellucci generates fear on the one hand in tenants who could lose their apartments to condo conversion and raises false hopes on the other in condo investors.

In the wake of Vellucci's statement late last week that he would continue to press for a relaxation of the condo codes for the Linnaean and Washington tenants, the mayor's five-part housing initiative announced earlier in the week seems only a smokescreen for his desire to cling to the condo issue as a source of political strength.

It is time that Vellucci end the bi-polar uncertainty on the council over condos and flatly declare his stance on the issue; that would allow the Cambridge administration to move on to the process of dealing with Proposition 2 1/2 effects on police, fire, public works, and school departments. Also awaiting council attention are initiatives on how to compensate for federal funding cutbacks by the Reagan Administration. The Mayor distracts the council from these and other matters with his game-playing over condos.

We urge Vellucci to speak plainly, feeling confident that when he does the Mayor will side not with the high profit speculators and the Independents, but with the low and moderate income tenants.