3. Example of a form a tenant had to complete to file a grievance against a building manager or owner. OPA/OHE administrators used dozens of such forms to track and process every kind of transaction involved in the administration of rent control. This one, filed by an African American housewife on the Near North Side, shows how much the government could learn about a landlord’s building and a person’s living conditions. Here, we can see how typewritten bureaucracy met handwritten daily life in the small details. Mrs. Goins did not pay by check, for example, there are gaps in information (we do not know why she was locked out), and she attempts to tell her own story at the end. Courtesy National Archives at Chicago (RG 252, entry 110B, box 6, folder: 353-55 West Chicago Avenue).
Just to the north in Lincoln Park, Fred and Ingeborg Lundgren used the same tactic in their small rooming house. They first came to the OPA’s attention in May 1945, when a young woman complained that she could not get the Lundgrens to give her any toilet paper or hot water. “I hope my name isn’t mentioned in reference to all this as I wouldn’t want my Landlady to make it miserable for me. It is hard enough to find a livable place nowadays.” And this is precisely where the Lundgrens’ power resided—in a citywide housing shortage that enabled owners to withhold petty things, like toilet paper, and finagle increases they knew were illegal. The cash economy of tenancy made this easy to do. Most tenants did not pay by check, which meant the only record of their payment was kept by the one who was handed the money. Tenant John Mason described Mr. Lundgren’s shady recordkeeping: “he don’t give receipts as he says he marks it on his books and if you ask again they always say we will slip it under your door, but that has yet to happen.” Whenever Mason had an overnight guest, he had to fork over five extra dollars—again, cash out with no return receipt. Like Brugger, the Lundgrens were repeat offenders. Their case file shows that after they were caught, ordered to pay refunds, and told to register their units, they would try again months later.34 OPA/OHE statistics suggest most landlords held steady in this kind of violate, wait, and repay cycle. They banked on tenants’ resigned or fearful compliance, but they would not fight a judgment in court if discovered. In a typical month in 1948, for example, the OHE ordered refunds to tenants totaling $14,434, of which $11,807 “was gained by voluntary compliance agreements with violating landlords.” Court action retrieved the rest.35
Another common landlord evasion was to charge a “bonus,” a bribe, really. Landlords would ask tenants to pay a one-time charge to either secure the apartment or get something extra, like a fresh coat of paint or some furniture. That charge, though, was actually a monthly rent increase spread across the whole year. The rent records are filled with tales of this creative greed. In Lakeview, Guy Le Pierres charged Effie Smith a $200 bonus just to take possession of the unit. On top of that, when she complained about the obviously dirty walls and scurrying water bugs, he told her that she would have to pay him $250 to remove thirteen layers of wallpaper and get rid of the pests. To be fair, he told her this up front, and, desperate, Smith buckled, telling him she would “take the apartment as it was” and try to adjust. She had just been evicted from a place where she had lived for twenty years because the building was sold and cut up into even smaller units, and she was now seeking another twenty-year arrangement. A widow who ran a small business from her home, Smith understood her vulnerability as a single, aging woman in a city with too many renters. “When one has a few white hairs it is not so easy to find employment and to become re-established in business. Am alone in the city without relatives,” she told the OHE. And as it turned out, Smith was merely one anecdote in a larger story of Le Pierres’s buildingwide malpractice.36
The plain illegality of the bonus did not deter owners and managers from repeatedly trying it, nor did it stop tenants from willingly paying it. This is how Howard Hardy and his wife in the fall of 1947 secured an apartment above the Fireside Lounge on North Clark Street, the busy commercial artery that ran through Lakeview. After seeing a newspaper ad, Mr. Hardy went over to look at the place, but owner John Mertke told him there were lots of other hopefuls. In an affidavit, Hardy recalled that aspiring renters were told to sign a waiting list, with name, phone, and address, along with “anything else they wanted to write.” When Mr. Hardy asked about the “anything else,” Mertke said he “meant money,” and so Hardy signed his name and wrote $200 next to it as bait. But he did not actually have the money. It was a gambit to keep his name at the top of the call list.
Sure enough, Mertke phoned the next day to invite Hardy and his wife to look at the place. After the tour, Mertke asked Mr. Hardy to go out on the back porch where they could talk money man to man. Though he had promised a bribe, Hardy had to stall, but Mertke warned him that if he could not deliver the money by that evening, the apartment would be gone. The Hardys believed him, so they left immediately to see Mr. Hardy’s father for a loan, but the senior Mr. Hardy did not have the cash on hand either. With his bank closed for the day, in a somewhat ironic twist, the senior Mr. Hardy turned to his own landlady for a loan. The $200 bribe would thus travel a twisted path, from landlady to tenant, from father to son, and from anxious wannabe tenant to shrewd landlord.
Before Hardy returned with the cash, he, too, made a clever move: he phoned a friend. Maybe he had read about these schemes in the newspapers, or maybe he just had some business smarts, but he thought if his friend, John Wright, would agree to go with him, he would have an honest witness for a dishonest transaction. He knew the bonus was illegal but, desperate, he was willing to pay it as long as Wright could be a kind of living receipt if Mertke reneged on the deal or later denied receiving it. When Hardy returned, this time not with his wife but with Wright, Mertke was startled, but he quickly grasped what Hardy was up to, telling him he “didn’t like the idea” of an observer. After a long and awkward silence, he finally told Hardy to “put the money in the stove and go out on the back porch” because he did not want Hardy to see him actually take the bribe. Here, Mertke tried to remove the man paying the illegal bonus as a witness to his own bribery crime. “This I refused to do,” said Hardy, and “after a lot of conversation,” Mertke finally relented, took the bonus in full view, and the Hardys moved in.
None of this would have ever been known had it not been for Mertke’s attempt months later to raise the rent, based on what he claimed were increased expenses to maintain the building. Angry that they were being asked to cough up even more money, the Hardys complained about Mertke’s poor service, but they still did not mention the bonus, because that would have exposed their own collaboration with Mertke’s violation. They finally blew the whistle only when the rent increase case made its way through the proper channels and the OHE granted Mertke his request—ignorant about the bonus because its victims had concealed it.37
This case is compelling for many reasons, not the least of which is its time line, which began when Hardy and his wife first looked at the apartment in September 1947, and finally ended in December 1950, when Mertke repaid the couple after a civil judgment against him in the U.S. District Court of Illinois. For Mertke and the Hardys, we might say, World War II’s struggles did not end until that judgment—over five years after Japan’s surrender. Another intriguing element is Mertke’s brazenness, indicative of the kind of (un)civil disobedience toward the rent law from landlords around the city. The OHE summoned Mertke to its downtown office—twice—and presented Hardy’s complaint with sworn affidavits. “It’s a lie,” he said—twice. Yet there is a clue that he may have felt some shame after all, because, after his denial, he stopped coming around to collect the rent, sending his wife instead to look Mr. or Mrs. Hardy in the eye and take their cash.38 In one way, we can marvel at the perseverance of landlords like John Mertke, who tried the same schemes over and over and then invented new ones when those failed. This was at once corruption and creativity! In fact, we see a kind of canny resourcefulness from everyone involved in the bonus racket. The sign-up sheet, the bluff, the friendly witness, the stove—this was an example of owners and tenants working around a war economy’s regulations to get what they wanted. Stories about housewives’ ingenious reliance on “Mr. Black” to circumvent food rationing were part of the comedic lore of World War II, but the black market in rental housing showed the same ingenuity.39
Nevertheless,
