Figure 4. The OPA/OHE received letters, postcards, and telegrams from both named and anonymous tipsters reporting rent crimes in their neighborhood. Sometimes these were filed by building residents too afraid to identify themselves, and in other cases, a friend or relative of the aggrieved tenant was the whistle-blower. This one came from a worker in one of Chicago’s many branch offices of the federal government (hence the moniker “Little Washington”). He, presumably because the building in question was a men’s boardinghouse, wanted to remain anonymous but nevertheless used his official government stationery, probably a gambit that his tip would get faster attention. Courtesy National Archives at Chicago (RG 252, entry 110B, box 47, folder: 211 E. Superior Street).

      Such conditions collided with tenants’ high hopes that the living would get easier after the war, so they became as resourceful and creative as their landlords. They were no angels. Some of their tactics were legitimate, while others were clever violations of the law. On the lawful end, tenants who could not afford a rent might barter with the landlord or building manager, trading a reduced price for cleaning up around the property or stoking the furnace in the morning. Other survival strategies were reminiscent of the turn of the century, when tenants turned their living rooms into workrooms or sublet a room in their own small flats. In fact, many of the landlord-tenant disputes turned on this issue of subleasing. Federal law stipulated that owners had a right to know exactly how many people occupied their building, and even one new resident could justify a rent increase. But many tenants sublet on the sly, for smuggling in a few others to reduce the rent was faster and less confrontational than filling out forms or having a quarrel with the owner. The housing shortage created a seminomadic urban population eager to find shelter, making it easy to find subtenants. All one had to do was put out the word—and not very far, for it was often kin who bunked together. When OPA investigator Elmer Hedin first visited West Elm Street in August 1945, he found people living cheek by jowl: “Practically every tenant in [the] building has roomers,” he observed. Odessa Wallington, for example, sublet with her seven children from Herbie Smith, almost certainly a relative. There may have been close to twenty people living in Smith’s flat, and “only a few are registered,” Hedin noted. This covert arrangement lasted over a year, until the La Dolces discovered it and evicted Wallington and her children as “squatters.” Stories of how people doubled up for the duration are well known, but it is important to recognize, as well, that even into the midfifties, there were about two million married couples or single parents still living with relatives.⁷⁰

      Operating on the cheap was not unique to landlords and managers in low-income areas. Owners of high-end properties, too, tried to augment their postwar revenue by cutting services, and wealthy tenants lamented the decline with the same fury as their poorer neighbors. On Chicago’s Gold Coast, elite tenants inhabited luxury “suites” that had been built during the city’s apartment boom of the 1920s. These tony residences were a short bus ride from the La Dolces, but in terms of status and space, they were a world away. While Odessa Wallington squeezed seven children into one room, an ad for a luxury apartment on Lake Shore Drive boasted “the clothes closets, even, are rooms in themselves.”⁷¹ But these pampered tenants, too, found that their postwar dollar did not go very far. Residents of a building on Astor, one of the most exclusive streets in the city, accused their real estate management company of cutting services while raising rents. Dr. John Delph’s letter to the OHE sounded a lot like those from West Elm Street tenants: “Service has fallen consistently,” he protested, citing poorly lit stairwells, general filth, and unreliable heat—bursts of hot air and then nothing. “I most emphatically do not favor another rent increase,” he told officials.⁷²

      The majority of Chicago’s tenants, however, earned much less than Dr. Delph. They were working class, and rent control was a simple matter of protecting what they had and reaching one more rung up the ladder. In fact, tenant claims echo the kind of “rights-conscious consumerism” Meg Jacobs found in her study of wartime and postwar meat consumers.⁷³ But controlling the price of rent was different than regulating the price of a hamburger. The regulation of food (or any household item) took place at the store—a public space (although privately owned) where volunteer price checkers could spy inflated prices, invite an OPA inspection, and later see the evidence of their activism. The regulation of rent, however, was a much more invasive kind of state intervention, a point overlooked by scholars of price controls. Most reports of violations could be resolved only by a visit from an investigator, whose job it was to peer into bedrooms and bathrooms and make notes about dirty sinks, peeling paint, and broken furniture. Investigators looked at names on mailboxes and compared that with how many they found inside the apartment. They examined hallways, basements, and trash areas. They looked for rats and bugs. They knocked on doors and asked questions of whoever happened to be home during their inspection, and if no one answered, they walked next door to talk with a neighbor. Violators were summoned to the