Postwar. Laura McEnaney
Читать онлайн книгу.
in the company of a government overseer. After that conference, a landlord could still make things unpleasant for a tenant in all kinds of subtle ways—just barely enough heat, a repair job that solved one problem but made another, or a constant scowl that made it a chore to ask for anything. Those who reported a grocer’s price gouging never had to face such nuisances—they could just leave the store and shop elsewhere. Not so for renters amid an enduring shortage. Price control of housing, then, necessitated an cozy clasp with the state’s regulatory arm. For owners and building managers, the reach was too long. For the tenant majority, the state was a welcome houseguest.
A return to Guy Le Pierres’s Lakeview building illustrates just how far in the state could reach. When OHE investigator Robert Sullivan went to the property in the summer of 1951, he found no one at home in any of the fourteen units. This was not unusual, as many tenant queries came from people who worked all day. In fact, one of the letters that brought Sullivan there in the first place was written by a married couple, who hoped a home visit might be an option because their jobs made it “impossible for us to appear at your office personally.”74 To learn if Le Pierres had done to others as he had to widow Effie Smith (demanded a bonus), Sullivan entered the building to copy names from the mailboxes, which he then used to send each tenant a complaint form. Normally, if tenants were on site and willing to talk, an investigator would enter their apartment to sketch a layout and record its condition. Although he found none of Le Pierres’s renters at home, Sullivan’s mass mailing yielded a whole paper trail of offenses, including a sad confession from one tenant about an off-the-books sublet from a “chronic alcoholic” brother whom she had to care for.75 This kind of candor seemed to pour out freely, as tenants in writing and in person told interviewers about illness, addiction, family stress, and finances. They were willing to share because they had to either plead a case or defend themselves, with both money and living conditions at stake, so we have to read their accounts with some discernment. Moreover, official complaint forms invited this disclosure—even required it—because tenant stories were legal testimonies used to render legal judgments.
Investigators had to determine how much of a complaint was fact or fiction. Yet when they pried, they often found the stuff of social work, not housing regulation. When Louis Klar needed some inside information to finish a 1948 case, he had to find a particular tenant, but his search took him deeper into the man’s life than he anticipated. When he did not find the tenant at home, he knocked on doors and canvassed the block, even peeking into local taverns, hoping that someone might point him out. He finally found a neighbor who explained that the man’s wife had died in that apartment, and so he had moved to another flat nearby, but she did not know exactly where. He asked the neighbor about children (so he could check school transfer records), and work (so he could check Social Security records), but she knew little more than his loss and then a departure. She could only tell Klar that the man “made a living doing odd jobs.” Klar even checked the Post Office, hoping for a forwarding address, again, coming up short. It was a series of legal dead ends for him, but a tale of deeply personal loss and likely economic insecurity for the man, given his sporadic work at “odd jobs.”76 The alcoholic brother, financial worry, the lack of options when things got hard, these were the real challenges of demobilization for the urban working class and poor.
Typically, an intrusive investigation like Klar’s was followed by another personal encounter, the compliance conference, where a rent control staffer would bring landlord and tenant together to help them find common ground. Here again, disclosure was part of the deal, because, after all, compromise is built on knowledge of another’s predicament. But in order to share mutual troubles, to tell the kind of stories that invite empathy, not enmity, safety and privacy were required, yet this was hard to find in such a bustling office. We can well imagine the awkwardness of telling a stranger with official power—and the inevitable eavesdroppers in the waiting area—about a personal financial or family problem. And we cannot assume it was only tenants who told tales of woe. As we have seen, small owners and building managers committed rent crimes because they, too, felt squeezed. The tact and steadiness required to hear shared suffering and broker a solution made it one of the harder jobs in the OPA/OHE. And this is why compliance staff kept rethinking the traffic flow and furniture arrangement, for they had a genuine sensitivity to the vulnerability that underlies all conflict resolution. “The lack of even the illusion of privacy lessens the dignity of the interview and decreases the chances of full disclosure by the person interviewed,” lamented one staff attorney.77 Compliance conferences usually lasted less than an hour, but they could feel interminable for tenants, and even when a judgment went their way, landlord retaliation back home was always possible.78
The case files show that OPA/OHE staffers were idealists and realists about this process. They believed in talk—that face-to-face conversation could bring mutual understanding and fair settlement. But when it did not, they never hesitated to take a landlord to court. Rarely did the compliance meeting become tense beyond what might reasonably be expected, but when it did, it could get weird. Milton Gordon recounted how one landlord snatched the required registration form from an investigator, “tore it in half, put it in his pocket, and made his getaway down the elevator before he could be intercepted.” Of course, they had carbons. One landlady tore up a compliance form that she had just signed, “jammed it in her mouth and chewed it up and swallowed it.” Unfazed, legal staff thought it was “more of an admission of guilt than actual harm to the case.” These were rare and bizarre, of course, but Gordon thought it important to record the crazy, because he thought it captured something of landlords’ hostility to rent control. The accounts “reflect public attitude toward the agency and compliance with the regulations,” he lamented.79
The Plight of the Middle Manager
Landlords’ antipathy to state regulation was shared by their building managers, who did the dirty work of apartment management without the financial security of ownership. Their stories take us into the third and final part of the triangular relationship in Chicago’s apartment housing: the economic plight of the hired landlord. Here we can see how a class of custodians, essentially, came to embrace the antiliberalism of their owner-employers. When a rent investigator showed up, the building manager was often the first to run interference for the owner, and if a violation was uncovered, the restitution often took a bite out of the manager’s income. When Mr. La Dolce called Odessa Wallington a squatter, he cared not for the wear and tear of eight people in one room but about his lost income. As historian Paul Groth found for managers earlier in the century, unless an operator owned the building, “its revenue was not substantial.”80 Rent records suggest the same was true at midcentury. In working-class Chicago, managers were more like tenants than owners; they just happened to have found something a bit more secure. In times of scarcity and price inflation, it was a shrewd financial move to hire oneself out as a caretaker, for it provided a modest but steady income (one could still hold another job), and, in a time of rampant turnover, it offered lodging with minimal chance for eviction (a safety net no tenant had).
It was not easy work, though. On West Elm, Brugger had outsourced his responsibilities to the La Dolces, insulating himself from the chore of keeping humans suitably sheltered. This way, he could draw a profit without the drudgery. Not so for the La Dolces. As hired hands, situated between ownership and tenancy, they had to interact with Elm Street renters—listen to their complaints, meet their eyes, and weigh their own financial interests against others in their economic tribe. They had a fragile kind of economic security, for, in order to stay on as Brugger’s managers, they had to charge tenants enough to cover both their own rent to Brugger and the building’s operating costs—and then still more to support other needs and wants. And they had to keep tenants quiet while doing that. After all, the luxury of absentee ownership was refuge from the riffraff, so managers had to keep the building profitable without provoking an insurrection.
We can see how building management was more economic drain than windfall if we go just a few blocks south of Elm, to 211 East Superior Street, where OPA investigator R. S. O’Toole found people sleeping in “as many double deck bunks as the room will hold.” Here, the manager, Mrs. Lancaster, had annexed the basement as sleeping territory, trying to squeeze yet more rent from the bowels of the building. According to O’Toole, it was “mostly GI’s”