than originally agreed upon. To make these or any other cases, though, one had to fill out a petition, submit receipts, and then wait—sometimes for weeks, often for a few months. And if landlords felt columns and boxes could not convey their plight, they had space to write, to frame their balance sheet as a postwar survival narrative.48 Thousands of landlords did this in an attempt to grow their income the legal way. In the first five chaotic months of the peace, landlords’ petitions for increases held steady at about 2,300 per month, and thousands more telephoned with questions. In that same five-month period, the OPA tallied an average of 24,565 phone calls per month and administrators calculated that just over half of these came from landlords.49
A more sinister read of these calls might suggest that owners sought guidance about the law not to follow it but to flout it. From the start of the war, price control evasion was a serious problem in every category, and it grew worse as the war came to a close. The paradox of evasion for owners was that the more they tried to outsmart the law, the more the government adapted and extended the reach of the despised regulations. As one economist has found, “to suppress evasion the OPA was forced to seek more and more control over the market place,” which was exactly what owners did not want. The OPA/OHE staffs kept trying, though, because they were “frequently frustrated” as they tried to reign in violators. In part, this was due to small staffs having to chase more and more offenders. Enforcement was the bedrock of rent control, as the Roosevelt administration had already learned from the failure of voluntary fair rent committees. Local branches of the OPA/OHE had their own compliance and enforcement units; they were the only muscle to ensure a judgment rendered was carried out. But declining congressional appropriations weakened that muscle. Throughout rent control’s existence, local offices were understaffed and incredibly backlogged. This was especially true in the final stages of the war, as controls lifted on certain commodities and it looked as if all regulation would disappear.50
Without enforcement, OPA/OHE staff feared, it would be a market free-for-all in cities across the country. Chicago’s office is but one example. At the start of 1947, chief attorney Milton Gordon told his director that budget cuts and staff resignations now threatened a near collapse of its enforcement operation at a time when the housing crisis seemed to be getting worse. “The word has already gone around in this town,” he said, “that landlords can violate with impunity,” for his tiny legal staff could only bring so many cases to court. “Landlords who are represented by attorneys … know we are just whistling in the 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
