money to pursue their grievance.57 Small landlords tended to represent themselves, but owners of larger buildings could hire a lawyer and get repeated postponements of their required visit to the OHE office (or court) to settle the case. Working-class tenants, on the other hand, had to miss work, which meant their time was money, lost on top of the overcharges or bonuses they may have already paid. Even so, if we imagine that tenant queries comprised 40 to 45 percent of the totals, the numbers are impressive. In an average month in 1946, there were 25,000 “personal calls,” that is, office visits, and 23,000 phone calls, which meant the staff was responding to almost 50,000 consumer requests per month.58 Indeed, the human traffic was so heavy that rent officials had to assign two policemen full-time to simply manage the crowds.59 Through 1947, an average of almost 26,000 (per month) came in person and 33,000 telephoned. If a particular policy change was announced, these already high numbers could spike even higher. In August 1947 alone, for example, 45,000 Chicagoans went to the OHE office looking for guidance on Congress’s new Housing and Rent Act.60 Fully four years after VE Day, the OHE was still taking in an average of almost 1,100 tenant complaints per month. Between July 1948 and May 1949, the OHE office handled almost 350,000 office visits, telephone calls, and written correspondence.61 Even into mid-1950, the Chicago Area Rent Office was still opening new branch stations to help tenants and landlords understand and follow the law.62
Mondays were the worst, with crowds snaking out from the counter to the door and all the way to the elevators down the hall. Office directors wrote detailed monthly reports that routinely lamented their backlogs, staff shortages, and internal inefficiencies. They sounded like interior designers when they puzzled over furniture, traffic flow, and sound, as they tried mightily to improve the public’s experience of coming to the office. Every effort was made to cut down on wait times, improve seating capacity, and give complainants more privacy, both because they genuinely wanted satisfied “customers” and because they thought a short wait might mean that people would “not get a chance to sit around and agitate each other.”63 In fact, they worried a great deal about office mood swings. On any given day, some combination of over eight hundred owners, managers, and tenants showed up in person, a potentially explosive mix if people on different sides of a balance sheet had to sit next to one another until they were called. One OHE attorney saw overcrowding as “a serious psychological hazard,” for if one interviewee were to “raise his voice and attempt to shout down the negotiator, the idea [could] easily spread to all other interviewees. On the rare occasions when some person feels moved to deliver an impassioned address, he has an audience in full view to inspire him.”64
Seemingly everyone, from the typist to the most senior administrator, pitched in when crowds grew too large. And it was just hard work—a test of patience and compassion to absorb the urgency, anxiety, or anger of another human being. Almost every person visiting or phoning had a fretful question or gripe, and the volume and pace was wearying. Indeed, reports from 1945 through 1951 offer a portrait of civil servants working long hours in a futile attempt to keep up with the demand. In one of his monthly summaries, Milton Gordon said wryly, “I look forward to the happy prospect of being able to perform my duties during the regular working hours.”65 Interestingly, Gordon’s prescient OPA predecessor had predicted this state of affairs for the postwar: “The end of the war and the transition from war to peace will undoubtedly make our job more difficult. It will be complicated by an increasingly unfriendly attitude on the part of landlords, by desertions from our ranks and by the impaired morale of those who are left to carry on the fight. In my judgment, effective rent control is more important now than ever before. Those of us who remain must do everything in our power to maintain morale and to hold the line.”66
This is precisely what renters wanted—someone to hold the line, and someone to help them fight when a landlord crossed it. From inside their crowded flats and converted basements, a different attitude about the state materialized. Living conditions after the war ran the gamut from acceptable to marginal, to a new category penned by one of Brugger’s tenants: “ant fit for a dog.”67 Tenants’ eagerness for state intervention is easy to understand if we survey the complaints from the Near North Side, Lincoln Park, and Lakeview, a catalogue of inadequacy and indignity. Dirt preoccupied many of them. Those whose rent included a weekly supply of fresh linens griped about reusing soiled towels and sheets because of cuts in maid service. Complaints of missing toilet paper popped up with some frequency. Many renters on the Near North Side (41 percent) shared bathrooms, so they did not control how often the supply was replenished. It is easy to imagine the irritation of sitting down to an empty roll and the humiliation of repeatedly asking for such a necessity. Bathing, as well, could feel like an insult when a tenant could not rely on a regular supply of hot water. Many said they received it only in the evening or on weekends; some received a steady stream in the winter but not in summer. Others found it difficult to acquire water itself, because of the labyrinthine way apartments and homes had been carved up. On the 300 block of West Chicago Avenue, for example, in a poor and largely African American quadrant of the neighborhood, all the tenants in the Milton Durchslag Realty Company’s apartments griped about hot water, but some even had trouble getting the cold. George Mangrum had moved to the building in 1944, and he told the OHE in the summer of 1952 that for years he had been carrying hot water from the kitchen to the bathroom because of the way Durchslag’s remodeling had reconfigured the plumbing.68
If clean linens, toilet paper, and hot water were often scarce, garbage was plentiful. Especially in the lower-income areas, renters griped about the filth they encountered simply walking through a hallway, using a shared bathroom, or emptying their own trash off a back stairway. In Durchslag’s building, a group of African American tenants complained in 1949 that a mounting pile of garbage was creating a health and fire hazard. According to Raymond Waters, who had been living there since late 1943, “the back stairs is so full of garbarg [sic] you can’t use thems if you drop a match we won’t have no home.”69
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
