a higher rent or to remove a perceived troublemaker. Case files from all three neighborhoods contain accounts of scary landlord rants designed to intimidate or the kind of slow drip of neglect intended to drive tenants crazy enough to leave on their own. To be clear, rent control did not prevent owners from kicking people out for all the regular reasons, like missed payments or creating a “nuisance.” Federal law offered a varied menu of legitimate eviction options. For example, owners or members of their immediate family who wanted to live in the building or who wanted to sell to another buyer for occupancy could ask tenants to leave. But when a tenant was ejected as a ploy to raise the rent, that landlord was breaking federal law. Chicago’s own eviction laws worked in tandem, not in conflict, with federal rent control, but the OPA/OHE could seek injunctions against landlords only when their rationale for eviction violated federal, not local, regulations. Administrators had no interest in superseding municipal rent codes or in serving as the local eviction sheriff.
Data kept by Chicago OPA/OHE offices show a mixed record on owners’ and managers’ compliance with eviction law. A petition had to be filled out and submitted to rent officials, and even if approved, a tenant had from thirty to ninety days to leave. Many owners tried to evict the legal way, but more banked on tenants feeling too afraid or too resigned to object to being kicked out illegally. Many evicted without notice but for a particular reason. The La Dolces, for example, used eviction to punish those who griped about their receipt ruse. When Ann Harris found out the actual price ceiling on her apartment, she tried to pay Mr. La Dolce that amount, “but he refused to take it and had me evicted,” she testified. Tenant James Green reported Mr. La Dolce’s aim: to convert his spacious flats into smaller units to collect more rent from each. “La Dolce is making rooms out of these 5 & 6 rooms as fast as he can throw people out of them,” according to Green’s affidavit.40
The overcharge, the bonus, the eviction—these were landlords’ postwar bread and butter. It is how they made their money in a controlled market. But in the process, they were committing what I call “rent crimes,” and when confronted by their government, some unleashed their contempt for controls and even governance itself. Tenant and court testimonies capture this fury. According to one Near North Side tenant, when his landlord was ordered to refund overcharges, he shouted “I don’t give a damn for the OPA,” and that he would do what he pleased with his private property. Another in Lincoln Park said “he would not let a bunch of Communist dictators run his affairs, [and] that he would close up his property and give us a taste of [a] housing shortage.”41 In both brushes with the OPA/OHE in 1945 and 1947, the La Dolces were unrepentant and defiant. Even with their inventive accounting fully exposed before the Cook County Circuit Court in 1945, they lodged a counteraccusation, their vitriol for controls fully unleashed: “all of the tenants … have illegally conspired together to bring whatever harm and trouble they can,” they claimed. They then challenged rent control itself, arguing it was patently “illegal, invalid and unconstitutional.” Rent laws “were enacted as wartime emergencies,” they conceded, but “since this nation is no longer in armed conflict, the original purpose of the regulations have [sic] ceased to exist and therefore … all the people of the United States should not be bound” by such legislation.42
They had a point. World War II was over. But its effects continued. In a 1948 case about the detention of a German citizen, the Supreme Court laid the rhetorical groundwork for what Chicago tenants knew already from experience—that “war does not cease with a cease-fire order.” That same year, in a rent control case that went all the way to the Supreme Court, a landlord argued that “wartime” should be more narrowly defined, otherwise a nation’s war powers could reach too far and last too long. The court disagreed, holding that war legislation “does not necessarily end with the cessation of hostilities,” citing the housing crisis as an example of how “the evils which have arisen from [war’s] rise and progress” could far outlast the war itself.43
But Chicago landlords lived by a different clock: the war was plainly over and any extension of controls was government overreach. As they saw controls on food, tires, and cars disappear, they began to wonder why they were the only ones sacrificing. As one OPA administrator observed, “there is a growing feeling of bitterness that they are being discriminated against.”44 This may help us understand why Le Pierres, Mertke, Brugger, and the La Dolces were not only repeated but self-righteous offenders. After all, what was the patriotic rationale for self-sacrifice now that the war was over? Why should they “hold the line on prices!” as the slogan went, when other sellers were jacking them up—and profiting nicely from it?
Owners and managers were far from powerless, however. In fact, in making their claims, they drew on several years of organized and influential resistance to rent control from coalitions of landlords, real estate agents, and builders. At the start of the war, the Chicago Real Estate Board told OPA officials that controls were “unwarranted and will be resisted.” Rents were already “at an unreasonably low level” during the Depression, they griped, and wartime controls would introduce yet another disincentive to build new properties. At the end of the war, the National Association of Real Estate Boards (NAREB), by now a powerful organization of real estate professionals, spread this message nationwide, dispatching speakers to decry rent control’s continuation. This organizing effort increased NAREB’s membership, as landlords and real estate agents around the country formed local NAREB affiliates to strengthen the organization’s lobbying muscle. In the spring of 1949, as Congress once again debated rent control’s extension, seven hundred Chicago landlords gathered to plan a protest march on Washington. At yet another meeting, Joseph Dixon, president of the National Home and Property Owners Foundation, called rent control “a scheme of Communists and Socialists” who were operating “behind the scenes,” according to the Chicago Daily Tribune. “We are tired of begging [for] crumbs from our own table. We want a fair deal, too,” he said. Dixon’s foundation also published an open letter to Congress, calling the OHE director a “Housing Dictator” whose agency “creates and continues shortages, instead of promoting more housing.”45
Such charges were inflammatory but not baseless. In fact, rent control did have a dampening effect on the construction of urban housing because it encouraged developers to look outside city limits for more favorable investment opportunities. World War II had been an industrial boom but a construction bust. Continued shortages of materials and labor, investment in suburban development versus urban renewal, and the devotion to single-family housing kept most working people in the overheated rental market for years after the war—in Chicago and across the nation. The demand nationwide was for low- and middle-cost urban housing, but the low profit margin in this sector did not attract private developers, who were already eyeing more lucrative opportunities in the suburbs. And yet, during the war, rent control did not contract the market for home buying as much as real estate agents and builders had claimed, because home sales were not subject to price control.46 We see a rise in homeownership in the forties, then, not because of new construction—the raw materials were simply not there—but because of what the Department of Labor identified as a “drastic shift” of properties from the controlled rental market to the unencumbered home sales market. Homebuilders thus joined real estate officials and landlords to zealously condemn rent control, because if people could remain in affordable rental housing, their profitable postwar building boom was threatened. Chicago’s OPA rent director, John Joseph Ryan, encountered this collective hostility when he attended a 1945 meeting with the Chicago Metropolitan Home Builders Association. Appearing with a host of other federal officials, he alone was “roundly ‘booed’” by the audience.47
As much as owners liked to complain about rent control as “big government,” they knew there were perfectly legal ways to collect more money from their tenants. After all, the OPA/OHE was proconsumer, not anticapitalist, and Congress’s rent laws represented limits on, not eviscerations of, the sanctity of property ownership. A few examples from the law make the point. If there was a spike in property taxes or operating costs, or if owners made structural improvements or increased services (such as janitorial), they could claim “substantial hardship” and ask for and receive a rent increase. Landlords or
