Postwar. Laura McEnaney
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dark when we talk about sending the case over to Enforcement for action,” he griped.51 At the end of that year, the Chicago region’s chief administrator, Oscar Abern, felt frustrated and resigned. “The violators are having a field day and some should be put in jail,” he said, referring to the city’s largest building owners, who were now routinely demanding anywhere from $500 to $2,000 in bonus payments for furniture, decorating, or just because they could. But even the rent crimes of the so-called small violator, like John Mertke, whom Abern blithely described as “the average citizen-landlord possessing the normal avarice,” needed to be checked, for any evasion was corrosive to the entire operation.52
For the “average citizen-landlord,” rent control was an economic burden, not a boon. Landlords were stuck with federal regulation so they had to either work with or around it. One of the tenets of war liberalism—the notion that one is deserving because of a wartime sacrifice—here became a strain of antiliberalism, for owners believed that the state was simply in their way, maybe even conspiring against the little guy trying to run a small business that foundered in wartime but could now prosper in peacetime. Some felt genuinely bewildered and betrayed by their government, because they were providing a scarce commodity in the midst of a crisis. But average violators like Mertke were not in a position to defeat federal rent control, so they tried to undermine it where and when they could. Indeed, they repeatedly gambled that their small violations could be their war reparations.
Tenants Fight Back
To counter owners’ evasions, the OPA/OHE relied on the eyes and ears of tenants, and here we move into the apartment building from their perspective, looking at how they, too, used a federal program to protect their postwar fortunes. Chicago had a long history of owner apathy, tenant activism, and official neglect. The advent of city building codes and their sporadic enforcement had remedied very little before World War II. War-driven migration pushed people into housing that had already deteriorated during the Great Depression, thus fusing the misery of the 1930s with the overcrowding of the 1940s. New construction, what there was of it, offered no relief. In Illinois, the OPA reported at the end of 1946 that “only about ten percent of the houses started this year have been completed and of the units completed very few are offered for rent.”53
Housing officials could not find a bright spot in the economic forecasts. At the end of 1946, one analyst reported: “The housing situation in all areas is as bad as ever.” By March 1947, an OHE memo reported that new construction in the entire region was “almost at a standstill,” with twenty-eight areas reporting continued or intensifying shortages. In the fall of 1948, Chicago Area Rent Office director Norman Shogren tried another way to count. He tracked “apartments wanted” ads for several weeks in his Sunday Chicago Daily Tribune, but here, too, the results were grim; the “wanted” columns were multiplying, not shrinking. He estimated that this was “the greatest amount of advertising” by apartment seekers since the war began. To even place such an ad, seekers had to part with one dollar per line, leaving him to conclude “that people are desperate.”54
As we have seen on Elm Street, owners tried to capitalize on this desperation by subdividing apartments, and these conversions then became the architectural inheritance of the postwar generation. The Chicago City Council had regulated some aspects of these conversions, encouraging owners in 1940 to install doors to separate newly divided flats, thus giving tenants a second emergency exit. The council further strengthened the codes in 1949, but the city’s confusing regulations proved baffling for the average tenant or landlord to understand. Chicago’s code enforcement, too, was decentralized and poorly staffed and managed. Most importantly, the 1949 code revision applied only to new construction. Given the old age of so many of Chicago’s buildings, this meant most postwar renters received no protection from their city government.55
Federal rent law was grafted onto this system of local ordinances in a way that helped fill the gaps for tenants. Although the OPA/OHE could regulate only price, the agencies nevertheless became embroiled in disputes over codelike issues whenever owners and managers withdrew a promised service, such as heat, in exchange for that price. In some ways, federal officials were doing the kind of enforcement local codes were not. This federal-city interface appears to have worked well in Chicago; throughout the reconversion, the OPA/OHE consulted regularly with city housing officials and consistently reported “splendid cooperation” with municipal judges when taking a landlord to court. OPA/OHE lawyers were careful not to overstep their bounds, navigating a tricky situation in which they had to enforce federal law in a local context. Mayor Kelly’s management of city housing from 1933 through 1947 was plagued with the corruption and political favoritism typical of urban housing operations. In contrast, as part of “Little Washington,” the OPA/OHE was not accountable to Chicago’s patronage system, so legal staff could pursue their work unfettered by provincial systems of rewards and favors. The clarity of these lines enabled cooperation with little irritation. Milton Gordon noted proudly that a Chicago judge “considers us as friends of the court.”56
This friendship worked well for tenants. Case files show that after four years of effective wartime regulation, Chicago renters felt it was their federal, not local, government that could better protect them in the postwar. Statistics on tenants are hard to track because the surviving OPA/OHE logs did not record whether a caller was a landlord, building manager, or tenant; they just counted the total number of people who either showed up to or telephoned the downtown office. Still, we can get some good impressions from monthly activity reports, which contained both numbers and stories from the trenches of the apartment regulation business. Rent control staff estimated that owners slightly outnumbered tenants, in part because they had more time and money to pursue their grievance.57 Small landlords tended to represent themselves, but owners of larger buildings could hire a lawyer and get repeated postponements of their required visit to the OHE office (or court) to settle the case. Working-class tenants, on the other hand, had to miss work, which meant their time was money, lost on top of the overcharges or bonuses they may have already paid. Even so, if we imagine that tenant queries comprised 40 to 45 percent of the totals, the numbers are impressive. In an average month in 1946, there were 25,000 “personal calls,” that is, office visits, and 23,000 phone calls, which meant the staff was responding to almost 50,000 consumer requests per month.58 Indeed, the human traffic was so heavy that rent officials had to assign two policemen full-time to simply manage the crowds.59 Through 1947, an average of almost 26,000 (per month) came in person and 33,000 telephoned. If a particular policy change was announced, these already high numbers could spike even higher. In August 1947 alone, for example, 45,000 Chicagoans went to the OHE office looking for guidance on Congress’s new Housing and Rent Act.60 Fully four years after VE Day, the OHE was still taking in an average of almost 1,100 tenant complaints per month. Between July 1948 and May 1949, the OHE office handled almost 350,000 office visits, telephone calls, and written correspondence.61 Even into mid-1950, the Chicago Area Rent Office was still opening new branch stations to help tenants and landlords understand and follow the law.62
Mondays were the worst, with crowds snaking out from the counter to the door and all the way to the elevators down the hall. Office directors wrote detailed monthly reports that routinely lamented their backlogs, staff shortages, and internal inefficiencies. They sounded like interior designers when they puzzled over furniture, traffic flow, and sound, as they tried mightily to improve the public’s experience of coming to the office. Every effort was made to cut down on wait times, improve seating capacity, and give complainants more privacy, both because they genuinely wanted satisfied “customers” and because they thought a short wait might mean that people would “not get a chance to sit around and agitate each other.”63 In fact, they worried a great deal about office mood swings. On any given day, some combination of over eight hundred owners, managers, and tenants showed up in person, a potentially explosive mix if people on different sides of a balance sheet had to sit next to one another until they were called. One OHE attorney saw overcrowding as “a serious psychological hazard,” for if one interviewee were to “raise his voice and attempt to shout down the negotiator, the idea [could] easily spread to all other interviewees. On the rare occasions when some person feels moved to deliver an impassioned address, he has an audience in full view to inspire