Susan Seidel lives off her Gillette Co. pension and Social Security benefits. Ruth Abrams earns $90,400 as a justice on the state's highest court.
The two women have little in common except that they live in rent-controlled apartments - and probably not for long.After years of failing to overturn rent-control laws in Boston and the adjoining communities of Cambridge and Brookline, frustrated landlords took their case to a statewide vote Nov. 8 and won.
The measure that passed 51 percent to 49 percent would phase out rent control by June 30. It means that some rents will likely double or triple - and thousands of people like Seidel, who can't afford to pay market value for their apartments, will have to move.
"I don't sleep at night, worried all the time," said Seidel, 73, who has lived in her apartment since 1969. "How much profit do they want while we go in the street?"
City officials and tenant advocates say at least 15,000 elderly people live in Boston's 22,000 rent-controlled units. Thousands more live in 20,000 regulated apartments in more affluent Brookline and Cambridge.
Opponents of rent control say they don't want to see people like Seidel end up in the street. But they are tired of shouldering the burden of poor and elderly tenants all by themselves. Some say they can't pay their mortgages or tax bills, or afford repairs on rent-controlled apartments.
"As a society we recognize our obligations to those of us who are in need," said John Coppola, a Boston property owner who heads the Rental Housing Association of the Greater Boston Real Estate Board. "But rent control is patently unfair."
Coppola and other opponents of rent control want housing vouchers and other subsidies offered to needy renters.
They also point out that not all renters are needy. Cambridge's law, for example, allows people of any income to live in rent-controlled apartments.
That's why someone like Abrams, a Supreme Judicial Court justice, has one. So does Cambridge Mayor Kenneth Reeves, who earns $43,400 as a part-time city councilor in addition to his income as a private attorney. He pays only $425 a month in rent.
A non-luxury two-bedroom apartment in Boston costs about $800 per month.
"Rent control doesn't make any sense," said William Wheaton, a professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and director of the university's Center for Real Estate.
"It's a silly way to go about helping the poor. It doesn't target them. It's grossly inefficient and it erodes the housing stock," Wheaton said.
Rent control first was enacted in the United States along with other price controls during World War II, when authorities feared a housing shortage would drive up prices.
It has survived, or was re-enacted, in a handful of major cities.