Rent Control's Demise: A Tale of Two Families

Vinnie Bologna and Rick Hill are both trying to raise families in Cambridge.

But today, two years after a state-wide referendum eliminated municipal rent control regulations, only Bologna can afford to do so.

Last January, faced with a $155 increase in his monthly rent and a dwindling supply of low-income housing around the city, Hill and his wife were forced to move their family of six across the river to Boston.

With its ramshackle wooden houses sporting pastel trims that stick out in a light dusting of snow, their new working-class Jamaica Plain neighborhood almost seems like Cambridge.

But as Rick Hill sits in his family's living room and hears his pregnant wife (who asked not to be named) chasing mice around the kitchen of their first-floor apartment, it is clear that this is not Cambridge.

"I lived in Cambridge for 40 years and I never saw a mouse," Hill says. "These mice, I can't catch 'em."

The Hill family's new rodent friends add insult to a more profound injury.

With roots across the Charles River that go back three generations, the move cut the Hill family away from the people who shaped their lives.

Almost as if he had moved to a country where they speak a different language, Rick Hill says he has little contact with his new neighbors.

"If you've known someone for 10, 15, 20 or 30 years, there's a difference than just knowing them for a year," says Hill, a former construction worker.

"I walk down the street now and I can't say hello to them. I don't know who the hell they are."

Features of big-city life--a troubled school system noisy ambulance sirens and the persistent rodent problem--only remind him of the lifestyle he left behind in Cambridge.

This same quality of life attracted Vinnie Bologna to Cambridge 12 years ago.

In late 1984, after spending two years in the Navy and eight years in Someville, the Sicilian native borrowed some money and bought a languishing raccoon-infested house on Harvard Street.

Vinnie and his wife-to-be, Laura Stack, looked at the single-family residence and rear-carriage house with long-term plans in mind.

"It was a lot of work, but we weren't afraid of doing it," they say. "We looked at it for the potential."

With help from his brother, a contractor in Methuen, Bologna finished the renovations in 1986.

That August he and Laura married, moved into the rear apartment and rented out the main residence.

Less than 11 months after receiving the first check from their new tenants, the Bolognas were dragged into a complex legal battle with their tenants and a Cambridge Rent Control Board that later admitted mistakes in the case.

It was a battle that left Laura and Vinnie with bitter feelings for not only the rent control regulations, but also the vast municipal bureaucracy that enforced them.

"It wasn't about justice," Vinnie Bologna says. "It wasn't about getting the landlord and tenants together to negotiate something. It wasn't even about helping people who couldn't afford it."

It was a system that for 10 years threatened to interrupt the Bologna's Long-term plans.

Now that rent control is moving out of politics into history, the Bolognas, facing more than $200,000 in debt, are settling their affairs and starting to getting on with their lives.

Both the Hills and the Bolognas see the rent-control issue as part of a broader shift within Cambridge.

They see sidewalks getting widened, bike paths popping up on Mass. Ave, and run down houses gettings spruced up.

It is the gentrification of Cambridge.

For people like Vinnie and Laura Bologna who can stay, it is an exciting time to be raising children.

But for long-time residents like Rick Hill who are forced to leave, it means fight to hold on to their way of life.

Rent control was narrowly repealed in a 1994 statewide referendum. But residents in Boston, Cambridge and Brookline, the three communities with rent control regulations, voted overwhelmingly to keep protections.

In Cambridge, sources say that of the between 12,000 and 14,000 residents in rent controlled apartments before 1994, about 1,500 are still living under some form of protected status.

A New Neighborhood

Lydia Hill, the oldest child in the Hill family, is now 16 and a sophomore at South Boston High School.

An honor student, her parents are hoping that she can win a college scholarship but are worried that her new school may not be providing adequate preparation for the next level.

"It's too easy for her over here," Rick Hill says.

"With the Cambridge schooling she could really educate her mind, really move her mind the way it's supposed to move. Here she comes home from school and finishes her homework in 45 minutes."

His Kids' experiences in Jamaica Plain stand in marked contrast to his own childhood in Cambridge. Hill became known around the city in the early 1970s as a gifted athlete.

In 1971 his football team at Cambridge Rindge Technical High School (Before it merged with Cambridge Latin to become Cambridge Rindge and Latin) went undefeated and unscored upon in all but one quarter.

Now, neighborly feelings and close family ties have been swept away by a tide of rising rent costs and escalating property values.

But even if Hill could have remained, he would have faced a glitizier, more rarefied neighborhood than the one he remembers.

Hill says that you can see it happening just by looking some of the city's new businesses.

"All the stores that you used to be able to afford like Zares, those stores are gone."

But while he may be outspoken about Cambridge's ongoing gentrification process, Hill understands many of the concerns that the Bolognas express about the former rent-control regime.

Hill feels that the City Council was a major source of problems, playing politics instead of tending to the legitimate concerns of both tenants and landlords.

Indeed, Cambridge's last mayor and a former rent-control tenant, Kenneth E. Reeves '72, became one of the most notorious symbols of well-to-do residents benefiting from poorly designed rent protections.

Hill believes the abuses, although they existed, did not define the system, He would have preferred a means-tested system an idea that was repeatedly proposed to the council by landlords, but never adopted.

A Long Way From Sicily

These days Vinnie Bologna often takes the five-minute drive home from work to eat lunch with his wife Laura in the family's airy, peach-colored kitchen.

The room has the immaculate feeling of kitchen in which the dishes have just been finished and the next project is about to be launched.

After overcoming a nightmare of legal battles, Vinnie and Laura Bologna are now focusing on that next project--raising their kids.

A machinist for the Cambridge pharmaceutical company Biogen who is studying electronics at night and raising three children, Bologna seems a happy man.

With three kids under eight years old, his wife Laura--who met Vinnie at a software company where they worked in the 1980s--says it is now best for her to stay home and raise the children.

But the mention of rent control conjures up bitter memories.

The Bolognas describe themselves as a struggling, working-class family, and say they sympathize with rent control's stated goal of aiding the disadvantaged. Yet after their experience with the system, they do not feel it is oriented toward those goals.

After purchasing the house in 1984 and obtaining occupancy and building permits from the city, they began a two-year renovation.

In the late summer of 1986 two women moved into the main residence. Only 10 months later, they stopped paying rent and sued the Bolognas for overcharging rent.

The tenants' suit opened a Pandora's box of allegations by the rent-control board, many of them regarding the renovation work. But the couple insists the board knew about the work that was taking place but said nothing at the time.

"They were waiting for us to finish to tell us that we finish to tell us that we shouldn't have done it," Vinnie Bologna says.

The Bolognas were surprised by the suit--and disgusted by the way it was handled.

"The lawyer that they got to sue us, he used to work with the rent-control officers, and the hearing officer used to work for him. They were all buddy-buddy," Bologna says.

The Bolognas' battle escalated into a full scale, three-ring legal circus. They eventually appealed the case to the state's Supreme Judicial Court, where they lost it on what they describe as a legal technicality.

Because they were unable to navigate the intricate web of city and state housing regulations, the Bolognas are facing a $150,000 settlement in favor of their tenants and $95,000 in legal fees.

While this debt forced them into personal bankruptcy, the Bolognas are now moving on with their life.

"We're lucky because we're young and we can still pick up the pieces and go on with this," Vinnie Bologna says.

Just as it allowed their own family to rebuild, the Bolognas feel that the demise of rent control has an equally positive effect on Cambridge.

Their own Harvard Street neighborhood is buzzing with contractors's pickups coming in and out of driveways, rotten wood getting torn off roofs and air-powered hammer-guns lining up rows of shingles.

"For the past two years, all the people have been trying to fix up their houses," Vinnie Bologna says. "The community looks better. Construction is everywhere. People take more pride in their property."

Both Laura and Vinnie acknowledge that these changes may force people to move out of the city.

But they don't see anything wrong with that. From their perspective, a family should live where it can afford to.

Both feel that only a small minority of rent-control recipients will be forced to move out of the city as their rent goes up.

They believe that those few evictions could have been avoided with a more efficient rent control system, including means test. RENT CONTROL

Currently there are very few research efforts to document the changes faced by the communities that lost rent control.

Professor of Law Duncan M. Kennedy '64, an expert in housing law and policy, is one of the area's few academics following the issue closely.

A Cambridge resident, Kennedy is currently supervising a series of independent studies by third-year Harvard Law School students that focuses on rent increases and eviction levels in Boston, Brookline and Cambridge in order to get an idea of the social consequences of rent control's repeal.

Although the Law School professor was unable to release the most recent Cambridge study, he said it appears that low-income Catagbragians are in the process of getting weeded out.

"The remaining class and ethnic diversity of the Cambridge area will be significant reduced in the next 18 months to two years, given the current tightness of the Cambridge housing market and given the longterm push toward gentrification," Kennedy said.

Those projections do not agree with separate estimates produced by landlord advocates.

Jim O'Reilly, director of public affairs for the Greater Boston Real Estate Board (GBREB), estimates that from a pool of nearly 22,000 Boston residents in rent-controlled apartments, only about 800 have an income low enough to qualify them for protected status.

While he acknowledges that talk of evicted tenants is "sexy", he argues that such cases are only a small percentage of the whole. Most people, he says, can afford a small increase in their monthly rent.

Meanwhile, Cambridge Mayor Sheila Doyle Russell asserts that needy tenants were a minority of those living under rent control. "When we got down to the protected status tenants, they only got to be about 10 percent of rent-controlled apartments", she says. Russell adds that had tenant advocate groups been more flexible in 1994, a means-based system might have been enacted.

Russell says the debate was more about politics than helping the needy". They were not interested in protecting tenants, they were interested in protecting rent control".

Kennedy says the GBREB's numbers miss many needy renters because of a variety of factors including language barriers.

Regardless of the numbers produced by Kennedy or any other group, there are some indications that the process of gentrification may continue to escalate.

Tenant advocates insist that if scrapping rent-control regulations does not force low-income residents out of the city, escalating property values and the paucity of low income housing will

Currently there are very few research efforts to document the changes faced by the communities that lost rent control.

Professor of Law Duncan M. Kennedy '64, an expert in housing law and policy, is one of the area's few academics following the issue closely.

A Cambridge resident, Kennedy is currently supervising a series of independent studies by third-year Harvard Law School students that focuses on rent increases and eviction levels in Boston, Brookline and Cambridge in order to get an idea of the social consequences of rent control's repeal.

Although the Law School professor was unable to release the most recent Cambridge study, he said it appears that low-income Catagbragians are in the process of getting weeded out.

"The remaining class and ethnic diversity of the Cambridge area will be significant reduced in the next 18 months to two years, given the current tightness of the Cambridge housing market and given the longterm push toward gentrification," Kennedy said.

Those projections do not agree with separate estimates produced by landlord advocates.

Jim O'Reilly, director of public affairs for the Greater Boston Real Estate Board (GBREB), estimates that from a pool of nearly 22,000 Boston residents in rent-controlled apartments, only about 800 have an income low enough to qualify them for protected status.

While he acknowledges that talk of evicted tenants is "sexy", he argues that such cases are only a small percentage of the whole. Most people, he says, can afford a small increase in their monthly rent.

Meanwhile, Cambridge Mayor Sheila Doyle Russell asserts that needy tenants were a minority of those living under rent control. "When we got down to the protected status tenants, they only got to be about 10 percent of rent-controlled apartments", she says. Russell adds that had tenant advocate groups been more flexible in 1994, a means-based system might have been enacted.

Russell says the debate was more about politics than helping the needy". They were not interested in protecting tenants, they were interested in protecting rent control".

Kennedy says the GBREB's numbers miss many needy renters because of a variety of factors including language barriers.

Regardless of the numbers produced by Kennedy or any other group, there are some indications that the process of gentrification may continue to escalate.

Tenant advocates insist that if scrapping rent-control regulations does not force low-income residents out of the city, escalating property values and the paucity of low income housing will