For all the arguments over specific provisions of the Cambridge rent law, the strongest reaction to the Senate's failure to act on the state-wide bill has come from two groups who have raised the basic question of whether locally empowered and administered rent control can work at all. The two groups, the Cambridge Tenants Organizing Committee (CTOC) and Citizens for Participation in Political Action claim that local rent laws are piece-meal and ineffective in the face of strong landlord opposition.

Both groups point to the example of Boston, where a vacancy decontrol amendment--designed to end rent control on an apartment as soon as the current tenant has left--was recently added to that city's six-year-old home-rule act. Almost every supporter of rent control insists that vacancy decontrol is "virtual decontrol." While landlords and realtors assert that vacancy decontrol doesn't hurt the long-term tenant--the "real" residents, as they like to put it--rent control supporters point to the fact that historically it is the poorest workers who move the most within their own city. So the people who can least afford to lose rent control are the ones who lose it first. As a result, CTOC claims, rents on apartments in certain neighborhoods--middle- and lower-income districts and some industrial areas--tend to rise before others, creating friction among people looking for apartments.

Finally, CTOC warns that under vacancy decontrol, landlords will be more likely to harrass tenants in order to get them to move. As soon as the unit is free, the landlord can legally up the rent without improving the apartment.

Whether all these dire effects are necessary in the scheme of things in Cambridge has yet to be seen. What convinces CTOC spokesman William Cunningham that home-rule rent control is no good is the simple fact that landlords and realtors' organizations support it. Cunningham claims landlords "couldn't have been happier," when Boston's locally administered rent law turned into a vacancy decontrol plan because it meant that rent control may well be crippled everywhere it is locally run. Rather than court the legislature any further, CTOC plans to turn its efforts to organizing tenants for militant action, including possible rent strikes and lockouts.

Cunningham may be right in his prediction that rent controls will be watered down throughout the state as a result of home-rule legislation. As the council meeting of two weeks ago illustrates, the fate of rent control may sooner or later hinge of the vote of one woman or man whose actions will profoundly affect the lives of many. If Graham had repeated her "present" vote at the council meeting which finally approved Clem's home-rule plan, the plan would have failed. And Cambridge would be left without an alternative to the expected death in committee of state-wide rent control. At the earlier meeting, Graham witheld her vote on a strategic matter. But after March 31, the same kind of vote on the same council could kill rent control for good.

The fate of rent control in Cambridge now depends on the City Council--which last week approved a control plan by a majority of only one.