Correction—he actually occupied two adjoining rent-controlled apartments.

Reeves was elected to city council as a champion of rent control, endorsed by the Cambridge Civic Association (CCA).

He liked being mayor so much that he wanted a second term. But the CCA expected its councilors to take turns at being mayor.

So he turned to non-CCA, anti-rent control members of the city council for the votes he needed to be mayor again. Then he quit the CCA.

Supporting Reeves in 1994 proved to be a smart move for the council’s rent control opponents, for Ken Reeves now became the notorious Mayor Who Lives In A Rent Controlled Apartment.

This was worth a lot of resentment votes on the statewide anti-rent control ballot question later that year. The question passed by a very small plurality.

Smart moves

Ken Reeves does his constituent service and hires aides who work hard at it. He is the quintessential political “progressive.” On issues like police-community relations, he is consistently in front of most other politicians.

He took no part in the movement that brought rent control to Cambridge in the 1970s, although he was a student at Harvard Law School in those years.

Reeves came late to tenant issues, but in 1982 he became a founding member of the Cambridge Rent Control Coalition.

However, after being elected to the city council in 1989, he stopped attending the meetings of tenant organizations.

Five years later, a few months after rent control ended in Cambridge, Mayor Ken Reeves bought the large luxury condominium on Harvard Street where he still lives.

The sale and easy financing were arranged through the law firm founded by the leading opponent of rent control on the city council, Bill Walsh. The former rent-controlled tenants had just been evicted.

By that time, attorney Ken Reeves was appearing in Boston courts representing the landlord side in eviction cases.

Follow the money

In 1997, the Hunneman Corporation announced plans to evict 22 local businesses from the Holmes Block and build a luxury apartment tower in the heart of Central Square. Councilor Reeves backed that plan and unsuccessfully tried to mobilize minorities against opponents, organized as Save Central Square.

In 1999 and 2003, petition campaigns aimed at placing rent control on the city ballot. Reeves would not meet with them. To one petitioner he would say “I’ve already signed it,” to another he would say, “I can’t sign that, because it has no chance to win.”

But when tenants had a chance to win in 2000, it was Councilor Reeves who cast the deciding vote against a condo conversion ordinance.

In 2001, the Reeves campaign spent far more than any other Cambridge city council candidate, a record $90,000— and still received the lowest vote of any successful candidate.

In the last election, he again finished ninth for the nine-seat city council.

Mayor Ken Reeves gets campaign contributions from an amazing number of developers, landlords, and their attorneys—John DiGiovanni, Jim Rafferty, Paul Burell, Carl Barron, Joseph Benoit, Stuart Rothman, Robert Beal, Joseph Nagar, to name some of the local boys.

The Mayor Who Lived In A Rent Controlled Apartment has come a long way.